The Sympathizer

In a decorative jar sitting on the Commandant’s desk, the two-headed baby coalesces a number of different ideas scattered throughout The Sympathizer: America as a corrupting and destructive force, the duality of the narrator, the grotesque absurdity of his very existence. 

White is both a color of rebirth and a color of mourning. In a more literal sense, it is also the color of colonialism and oppression. In Chapter 11, the narrator recalls the white room in which a “white lump” formed on the throat of the Watchman, a man whom the narrator had driven to suicide with torture (192). During the narrator’s own torture, he is flooded with bright white lights, which “cleanses” him in the most brutal way possible—there is a comparison to be drawn here between white colonizers and the white lights in the way that both “cleanse” through violent means. In Chapter 22, during the height of the Commissar’s torture of the narrator, the Commissar begins to laugh. “What was so funny?” the narrator asks of the Commissar’s laughter. “This black comedy? No, that was too heavy. This illuminated room allowed for only a light comedy, a white comedy where one could die from laughter, not that he laughed that long” (364). The connection between whiteness and death/rebirth function on multiple levels by supplementing some of the major themes in the book – for example, the theme of paradoxical truth and the theme of anti-colonialism – which adds to the overall thematic depth and complexity of The Sympathizer.

As with the color white, the color red has multiple meanings, all of which depend on context. Red is the color of revolutionary Communism, of course, but it is also the color of the “lucky” envelopegifted to the narrator on New Year’s by his aunts. The narrator is explicit about the many meanings of red when looking at this red envelope, which represents the mistreatment by his aunts: “But you see the lie beneath those things because you never got to take part. You see a different shade of red than them. Red is not good luck. Red is not fortune. Redisrevolution. All of a sudden I, too, saw red, and in that throbbing vision the world began to make sense to me, how so many degrees of meaning existed in a single color, the tone so potent it must be applied sparingly. If one ever sees something written in red, one knows trouble and change lie ahead” (142). The color of luck to the narrator’s “normal” Vietnamese cousins, for the narrator it becomes the color of pain and redemption.

Read literally, Richard Hedd’s book is a view into the Western academic’s mind about the Vietnamese, which includes condescending passages that recommend bombing Vietnamese villages, with lines such as: “Bombing his [the Vietnamese’s] village will of course upset him, but the cost is outweighed ultimately by how airpower will persuade him that he is on the wrong side if he chooses communism, which cannot protect him” (142). The book, ironically, is used as the cipher text that the narrator and Man both reference when decoding secret messages to one another. Using Hedd’s words against him, literally for their exact intended purpose, fits in with the theme of truth in contradiction. Additionally, when the book falls apart at the seams, it coincides with the narrator’s own splitting into two (376).