The Sympathizer

“After the tenth putsch, I accepted the absurd state of our state with a mix of despair and anger, along with a dash of humor, a cocktail under whose influence I renewed my revolutionary vows.” 

Here we are given the exact formula for revolution, which is espoused in different permutations throughout the entire book: despair, anger, with a dash of humor and absurdity. These are the primary ingredients for revolution.

“I was doing my best imitation of a Third World child on one of those milk cartons passed around elementary schools for American children to deposit their pennies and dimes in order to help poor Alejandro, Abdullah, or Ah Sing have a hot lunch and an immunization.” 

“I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word ‘murder’ made us mumble as much as the word ‘masturbation.’”

The narrator, having just shared a childhood story about how he first used a squid as a means of masturbation, is not ashamed. Part of his Americanization is being sexually liberated, so discussing his misguided masturbation technique does not faze him.

“It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.” 

This is a succinct version of a notion that appears over and over again throughout the book.

“His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination)” 

This commentary from the narrator furthers the theme of Hollywood as propaganda machine throughout the novel.If you control the means of representation (as Americans do with Hollywood), it does not matter if you won or lost the war.This is why American-centric narratives are the primary result of the Vietnam War, and how actual Vietnamese voices are written out of popular accounts of the war altogether.

“But most actors spent more time with their masks off than on, whereas in my case it was the reverse. No surprise, then, that sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face.” 

This quote is from the narrator, and it exemplifiesthe kind of inner turmoil that accompanies being a spy, a mole, a man of two minds.

“Let’s put it this way, she said. Before the communists won, foreigners were victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. Now it’s our own people victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. I suppose that’s an improvement.” 

These are the words of a Vietnamese extra cast in The Hamlet when asked by the narrator if things in Vietnam are really as bad since the fall of Saigon as rumored. They are, in fact, worse than the narrator can imagine.

“I had won the argument, but somehow, as in our college days, he had won the audience.” 

Sonny captures the heart of Ms. Mori, the “audience” in this quotation.The rivalry between Sonny and the narrator, combined with his budding love affair with Ms. Mori, complicates the narrator’s grief after he is forced to assassinate Sonny.

“What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves.” 

In Bon’s characteristically world-weary, crass manner, he gives Sonny an extremely cynical view of what makes us human.

“Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word.” 

“You know why I like you? she had asked in the aftermath. You’re everything my mother would hate. I was not offended. I had been force-fed so much hate that a little more hardly mattered to my fattened liver.” 

The narrator’s brief sexual tryst with Lana ends like so many others, with her using his identity as a “bastard” against him. This quote is from Lana, referring to her superficial, immature reason for sleeping with the narrator.

“I remember the injustice of how my mother never came to visit me after her death no matter how many times I cried out for her, unlike Sonny and the crapulent major, whom I would carry with me forever.” 

Ironically, the ghost of his mother—the only one he wants to see—will not appear to the narrator. Ghosts serve as manifestations of guilt in this novel.

“Revolutionaries are insomniacs, too afraid of history’s nightmare to sleep, too troubled by the world’s ills to be less than awake, or so the Commandant said…I was divided, tormented body below, placid consciousness floating high above, beyond the illuminated ceiling, buffeted from my agony through an invisible gyroscopic mechanism.” 

After so many days of sleep deprivation, the narrator’s eyes are literally open. Contributing to the motif of seeing/eyes, the Commandant defines the revolutionary in terms of his wakefulness. Meanwhile, that same wakefulness is responsible for splitting the narrator’s consciousness in two—this quote is taken from the very moment of separation.

“No, just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides. This was not simply hard to do—no, it was impossible, for how could I choose me against myself? Now my friend would release me from this small world with its small-minded people, those mobs who treated a man with two minds and two faces as a freak, who wanted only one answer for any question.” 

The narrator extends this two-mindedness to all of Vietnam, referring to the fact that the Vietnam War was a civil war against its own people, divided between arbitrary distinctions of North and South.

“Somebody was screaming and I knew who it was.It was me, screaming the one word that had dangled before me since the question was first asked—nothing—the answer that I could never see nor hear until now—nothing!—the answer I screamed again and again and again—Nothing!—because I was, at last, enlightened.” 

“We cannot be represented here and this knowledge hurts more than anything done to me in my examination.” 

The pain of being written out of history, of having an entire people’s suffering ignored, is more painful than any individual trauma in the long run.

“A good student cannot understand nothing; only the class clown, the misunderstood idiot, the devious fool, and the perpetual joker can do that. Still, such a realization could not spare me from the pain of overlooking the obvious, the pain that drove me to push the commissar away, to beat my fists against my forehead.”

The narrator is incredibly intelligent—so intelligent, in fact, that he is too logical to understand the ludicrous concept of dying for nothing. Once he is driven to madness, he is able to better comprehend this motivating force behind wars.

“How could I forget that every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were empty suits draped on the course of an idea?” 

This quote is emblematic of the kind of circuitous logic that points to truth in the novel. 

“Is he still not saying anything? The commandant asked, whenever he dropped by, to which I said, Nothing, nothing, nothing, a grinning simpleton huddled in the corner. Poor fellow, said the doctor.” 

The narrator truly loses his mind after the sleep deprivation, only able to mutter the word “nothing”—which is loaded with many layers of symbolic meaning—for months afterward.

“I felt very sorry for the man with two minds, as would be expected. He had not realized that such a man best belonged in a low-budget movie, a Hollywood film or perhaps a Japanese one about a military-grade science experiment gone terribly awry. How dare a man with two minds think he could represent himself much less anyone else, including his own recalcitrant people?” 

“Some might say I was seeing things, but the true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus…We often deceive ourselves when we thought we saw ourselves most clearly.” 

Most people viewed the narrator as an anomaly for being half-Vietnamese and half-French, but here the narrator comes to the realization that most people are divided, in some way. The narrator reflects upon how Man is split between being a cruel torturer as the Commissar and the narrator’s closest confidant as his childhood best friend.

“He was the faceless man who had tortured me, for my own good, for the sake of nothing. But I could still recognize him, for who but a man with two minds could understand a man with no face?…The only benefit from his condition was that he could see what others could not, or what they might have seen and disavowed, for when he looked into the mirror and saw the void he understood the meaning of nothing.” 

It may be difficult for the reader to understand how it is possible that the Commissar, the narrator’s closest friend, can inflict such pain on the narrator. It is a testament to the narrator’s incredible powers of sympathy, that, in spite of the torture, he can see something of himself in the Commissar. 

“What had I intuited at last? Namely, this: while nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom! These two slogans are almost the same, but not quite.” 

The narrator finally grasps the double-edged meaning of this slogan, the italicized version representing a suffering-infused version of an otherwise empty platitude.