In the end, his lack of conviction makes him the most immoral character of all.ĭespite how dark it is, The Sympathizer is still a fast-paced, entertaining read. The narrator commits horrible acts on behalf of the North Vietnamese government he serves and the refugee community he’s spying on. Nguyen largely ignores these questions and instead tackles the role of individual morality in a time of war. McMaster’s excellent book Dereliction of Duty.) More than 40 years later, many Americans still grapple with the big questions surrounding the Vietnam War: should we have gotten involved? Did our political and military leaders know what they were doing? Did they understand what the human cost of the war would be? (If you’re interested in reading more about this debate, I recommend H.R. Most war stories are clear about which side you should root for- The Sympathizer doesn’t let the reader off the hook so easily. Nor does he pass judgment about where his narrator’s loyalties should lie. Nguyen doesn’t shy away from how traumatic the Vietnam War was for everyone involved. Instead, he “sympathizes” with people on both sides of the conflict.įor a novel that’s been met with such commercial success and critical acclaim (it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year, and Nguyen recently received a MacArthur genius grant), it is surprisingly bleak. Much to the chagrin of the camp’s commandant, this confession makes it clear that the narrator is not a true believer in their cause. The story we’re reading is the narrator’s confession, which he is forced to write while held in a North Vietnamese reeducation camp. After he’s air-lifted out of the country during the fall of Saigon, he ends up in California spying on his fellow refugees and sending reports written in invisible ink to his handler back in Vietnam. The Sympathizer’s narrator-we never learn his name-is a communist double agent embedded with the South Vietnamese Army and their American allies. I don’t usually reach for historical fiction, but when a good friend recommended it, I picked up a copy-and I’m glad I did. Most recently, I picked up The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. In the years since that trip, I’ve tried to learn more about the Vietnamese experience. But the visit made me realize how little I had seen or read about the Vietnamese perspective on the war. You would have never known our countries were at war just decades earlier. Everyone I talked to was warm and welcoming. The answer was, to my relief, a resounding no. Many of the people I was scheduled to meet with lived through the war. So I was unsure when I found myself on a plane to Hanoi in 2006. Like many people of my generation, my view of the conflict was influenced by violent, American-centric movies like The Deer Hunter. I didn’t know what to expect the first time I visited Vietnam.Īlthough I’m a bit too young to have worried about my draft number, the Vietnam War cast a long shadow over my youth.
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