Johns Hopkins University Press
  • "A Man of Two Faces and Two Minds":Just Memory and Metatextuality in The Sympathizer's Rewriting of the Vietnam War

Vietnam War narratives typically adopt a limited perspective that Viet Thanh Nguyen, in his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016), terms "unjust memory," which recalls the past from a self-serving position that remembers the self as human and other as inhuman. In contrast, Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer (2015) represents the war from a more inclusive perspective that Nguyen calls "just memory," which strives to recognize the shared humanity and inhumanity of the self and other. This essay critically examines The Sympathizer as a literary companion to Nothing Ever Dies, arguing that its metatextual qualities shape its project of rewriting the history of the war from the lens of just memory. By employing meta-textual techniques, such as characterizing the narrator as a figure of duality, featuring a nested narrative form, and self-referentially exploring the performativity of writing, The Sympathizer reveals that language and memory can be manipulated to construct varying versions of "truth." In doing so, The Sympathizer suggests that in order to build a more just world, we must first recognize the potential limitations and possibilities of narrative, which can be either weaponized to justify violence or engaged to imagine a future free of war.

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent […]. At other times, […] I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess. But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.

—Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

In this opening paragraph of Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer, the unnamed narrator attributes his ability to see multiple sides of any issue to his positioning in a liminal space of duality. In [End Page 57] describing himself as a man of two faces and two minds, the narrator draws attention to both his occupation as a communist spy in the republican South Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War and his mixed-race heritage as the son of a Vietnamese peasant girl and French priest. These interrelated positionalities mutually reinforce each other, granting the narrator a "multitudinous subjectivity" that allows him to sympathize with multiple perspectives (Rody 2018, 400). Notably, the narrator views his unique "way of seeing the world" with ambivalence, observing that he often vacillates between reading this quality as, on the one hand, a "talent" or "virtue" and, on the other hand, a "hazard" or "danger" (Nguyen 2015, 1). In highlighting both that he is a man of dual subjectivity and that his capacity for sympathy can be interpreted in various ways, the narrator indicates that there is no absolute sense of truth, since any one signifier can yield multiple meanings. Equipped with this understanding, the narrator continues to explore the ambiguities of language, identity, and truth throughout the rest of the novel as he recounts his experiences as a communist spy and refugee during and after the Vietnam War. In doing so, he explores what Nguyen has identified as one of the central concerns of The Sympathizer: "how language and form can alter our understanding of a reality constituted by millions of dead" (Nguyen 2018, 429). As a work that is invested in exploring the connections among language, form, and reality, The Sympathizer possesses a "self-reflexive, metafictional quality [that] continually draws attention to the politics of writing and reading" (Nguyen and Fung 2017, 203). In this essay, I take as a central focus this self-reflexive, metafictional quality, which I argue is fundamental to the novel's political project of critiquing unethical memory campaigns run by the major parties involved in the war (specifically the United States, South Vietnam, and North Vietnam), all of whom manipulate language and storytelling to justify their inhumane actions as morally righteous.

I suggest that The Sympathizer's self-reflexive, metafictional quality emerges across three levels throughout the novel: characterization, form, and genre. First, the narrator's characterization as a man of two faces and two minds renders him an unreliable signifier, given that he is frequently misread by other characters who are unable to understand the complexity of his identity's "duality and duplicity" (Xiang 2018, 420). Such unreliable signification is echoed in the double meaning of the novel's title, which can refer to the narrator's positionality as either a communist sympathizer or a person who can [End Page 58] sympathize with multiple perspectives. Second, the novel's metatextuality emerges on the level of form, as the novel uses a variety of rhetorical strategies to destabilize the notion of truth. Written as a confession generated by the narrator while he is imprisoned in a communist reeducation camp, The Sympathizer is rife with information that must be continually questioned, given that its production under duress renders the narrator's testimony unreliable. This unreliability is reinforced by the narrator's stream-of-consciousness writing style, which allows him to intersperse the linear progression of his testimony with long discursive asides that demonstrate little concern for narrative continuity. In a move that further destabilizes his testimony's reliability, the narrator frequently quotes other characters, granting his manuscript a nested narrative quality by embedding multiple stories within his larger confession. Finally, the novel's metatextuality continues to manifest through genre choices, as The Sympathizer defies clear categorization by "perform[ing] multiplicity with a showman-like flair, moving unpredictably from genre to genre" (Chihaya 2018, 365). Indeed, the novel remixes various conventions of historical fiction, confessional tale, environmental justice literature, epistolary narrative, espionage thriller, refugee testimonial, war story, and political satire to create a pastiche-like new category that further highlights the novel's "fungible, flexible, and unresolvable multiplicity" (364).

These many interwoven levels of metatextuality underscore several critical questions that I suggest the novel raises about the limits of representation: If reality is constructed through language, is it possible for rhetorical practices like writing and reading to be anything but performative or political? What might it mean to represent concepts like the self or history authentically through rhetoric, given that language is inherently unreliable as a medium of expression? And given that our understanding of history is often constructed through language, is it possible to recall the past in a way that does not derive from or perpetuate self-serving ideologies?

In this essay, I will explore these questions by critically examining the metatextual qualities of The Sympathizer, which I argue shape the novel's larger project of modeling a form of ethical remembrance that Nguyen calls "just memory," given that advancing this type of memory depends upon recognizing that language can be manipulated to construct varying versions of history and (by extension) truth. To contextualize my argument, I must provide a brief gloss of how Nguyen defines just memory in his book Nothing Ever Dies: [End Page 59] Vietnam and the Memory of War, which can be read as a scholarly companion to The Sympathizer.1 He describes just memory as a form of postwar remembrance that "strives both to remember one's own and others, while at the same time drawing attention to the life cycle of memories and their industrial production, how they are fashioned and forgotten, how they evolve and change" (Nguyen 2016a, 12). This form of memory is inherently inclusive, recalling not only the heroes within one's own identity group but also "the weak, the subjugated, the different, the enemy, and the forgotten" (17). Nguyen explains that to put just memory into practice, we must move beyond remembering the self as heroic/human and the other as unheroic/inhuman; instead, we must adopt "an ethics of recognition, of seeing and remembering how the inhuman inhabits the human," not only in the other but also in the self (19). This move is critical for ensuring that past forms of violence are not repeated, since acknowledging the humanity and inhumanity of both ourselves and others helps disrupt polarizing identity politics and imagine a more equitable world in which violence can no longer be justified by "the war machine's binary logic of us versus them, victim versus victimizer, good versus bad, and even winning versus losing" (265).

Art plays a crucial role in helping us achieve this kind of ethical remembrance because it "speaks truth to power even when our side exercises and abuses that power" (Nguyen 2016a, 267). I read The Sympathizer as a model of this kind of art because it rewrites Vietnam War history from the lens of just memory by recognizing the shared humanity and inhumanity of all parties involved in the conflict. I will show how the novel's metatextual qualities directly support this larger project of ethical remembrance by exposing on the level of narrative form how the war's competing parties all manipulate language to justify self-serving acts of violence. In doing so, the novel imagines new possibilities for how language might be used to (re)define society based on collective consciousness rather than binary divisions.

US-CENTRIC VIETNAM WAR NARRATIVES AND THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF MEMORY

In claiming that The Sympathizer rewrites Vietnam War history through the lens of just memory, I am (by extension) also asserting that this novel rejects the more common practice of representing the war through an oppositional lens that Nguyen calls "unjust [End Page 60] memory," or "the ethics of remembering one's own" (2016a, 9). He explains that unjust memory occurs when nations urge their citizens "to remember their own and to forget others in order to forge the nationalist spirit crucial for war, a self-centered logic that also circulates through communities of race, ethnicity, and religion" (11). This unjust practice understands that "memory is a strategic resource in the struggle for power" and weaponizes this resource to consolidate power and justify self-serving behaviors (10). Such weaponization occurs through "the industrialization of memory," which is fueled by collective efforts from the government, the military, politicians, universities, artists, and writers to turn nostalgia into a commodity that can reinforce the operations of the war industry (13).

Perhaps the most notable example of a nation that employs unjust memory is the United States, which has historically downplayed its role in devastating Vietnam and instead framed its intervention as a necessary effort in a moral crusade against communism.2 On March 24, 1977, Jimmy Carter characterized US intervention in Vietnam as an expression of American heroism, claiming, "The destruction was mutual. You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people. We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese."3 A few years later in 1980, Ronald Reagan diagnosed the nation with "Vietnam Syndrome," which he defined as the misguided belief that US intervention in Vietnam was motivated by imperialistic aggression, and sought to overturn this belief by remembering the Vietnam War as a noble cause born of humanitarian efforts. George H. W. Bush continued this narrative in 1990 when he drew parallels between US intervention in Iraq and Vietnam, declaring both to be human rights necessities. On March 1, 1991, days after pronouncing Kuwait liberated from Iraq, Bush cemented this link between Iraq and Vietnam by stating, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all" (Darda 2017, 72). This logic has continued to justify post-9/11 counterterror measures during the War on Terror, which have evolved from the anti-communist operations of the Cold War (Masco 2014). In a speech delivered on August 22, 2007, George W. Bush invoked the memory of the Vietnam War to request more funds for the war in Iraq, attributing the dislocation of four hundred thousand Southeast Asian refugees to the United States' withdrawal from Vietnam rather than to the United States' entry into the country in the first place (Pelaud 2010, 7). Taken together, the claims of these various presidents capture the United States' revisionist [End Page 61] history of the Vietnam War, which Yến Lê Espiritu explains is necessary to maintain the nation's "'rescue and liberation' myth" (2014, xi). In crafting this narrative, the United States has managed "to fold the Vietnam War into its list of 'good wars'—military operations waged against 'enemies of freedom' and on behalf of all 'who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance, and freedom,'" without accounting for its direct role in producing the social, economic, political, and ecological devastation that resulted in the dislocation and deaths of millions of Vietnamese people (104).

Unjust memory is further employed whenever US narratives about the Vietnam War center the perspective of the white male soldier or veteran, thereby engaging in a practice of glorifying the self and pitying the other that is fundamentally antithetical to the inclusive aims of ethical remembrance. Such narratives became popularized in the late twentieth century in the form of literary works like Stephen Wright's Meditations in Green (1983), Jack Fuller's Fragments (1984), and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990), as well as films like Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), Joseph Zito's Missing in Action (1984), and George Cosmatos's Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), which feature white male soldiers or veterans as protagonists and celebrate these men as virile warrior-saviors. While many of these works meditate on the question that Stewart O'Nan claims "tortured all of America back then and still troubles some now: Was the war right or wrong?" (1998, 3), disturbingly few of them explore the possibility that the war might reflect "a fundamental flaw in the American character, as being the culmination of a long history of racial domination and imperial expansion since the seventeenth century" (Nguyen 2016c, 51). Since, as Nguyen notes, being able to feel guilt is a privilege of subjecthood, even when these narratives criticize the actions of the US military, they nevertheless reproduce unjust memory by centering the perspectives of American soldiers and demanding "sympathy and empathy for their virtues and their failures" (2016a, 48). Indeed, these popular narratives reflect what Espiritu identifies is a common tendency in public discussions about the war to "skip over the history of militarized violence inflicted on Vietnam and its people" in order to imagine the war as an "American tragedy" (2014, 18; emphasis original). These popular narratives sometimes go so far as to equate the experiences of American veterans with those of Vietnamese refugees, constituting a new genre that Joseph Darda calls the "veteran-as-refugee narrative," which establishes the white male veteran as "refugeed from [End Page 62] the nation" and thus martyred as an "icon of white alienation," as a debtor and victim, rather than as an active agent of racial and colonial violence (2019, 86, 89; emphasis original). I echo Darda's critique that this veteran-as-refugee narrative establishes an implied hierarchy in which the needs of white veterans problematically become privileged over those of actual displaced refugees (2019, 89).

When US-produced Vietnam War narratives do feature Vietnamese refugees, these depictions are often inaccurate and unflattering. Mai-Linh Hong notes that "Vietnamese refugees have appeared in American literature, historiography, and mass media most often as passive, traumatized objects of Western spectatorship, pity, and charity; as reminders (to Americans) of US military failure; or, in more positive but no less problematic cases, as grateful, compliant additions to the American national community" (2016, 22). Like narratives that center the white soldier/veteran's perspective, such representations of Vietnamese refugees reflect the United States' self-aggrandizing impulse to center the self by objectifying the other. Nguyen critiques this practice as an extension of unjust memory disguised as liberalism, since no matter how much such representations might appear to sympathize with the Vietnamese refugees, they nevertheless relegate these refugees to a "subordinate, simplified, and secondary status" that contrasts with Americans' "more complex selves" and thereby continue to reproduce US nationalism (2016a, 97).

Given that the US memory industry enjoys hegemony in the global imaginary, many Vietnamese American writers are compelled to indirectly support the United States' unjust memory practices to gain entrance into the US literary market. Racialized as ethnic others in the United States, Vietnamese American writers face the challenge of conveying Vietnamese people's humanity without undermining the myth of American exceptionalism, which might invite dismissal by the United States' predominantly white publishing industry and readership. To appeal to white audiences, Vietnamese American authors often employ tactics like translation, in which "the author or the narrator explains some feature of the ethnic community, such as its language, food, customs, or history," as well as affirmation, in which the author "endorses the American Dream, the American Way, and American exceptionalism" (Nguyen 2016a, 203, 204). Such tactics are necessary for Vietnamese American literature to fulfill what Nguyen explains is, within the rubric of the United States' unjust memory industry, "ethnic writing's most basic [End Page 63] function: to serve as proof that regardless of what brought these others to America, they or their children have become accepted, even if grudgingly, by other Americans" (198–99).

The Sympathizer notably deviates from these trends in US-centric Vietnam War literature by refusing to reproduce the US memory industry's unjust practices. Instead, it seeks to expose the US war machine's ongoing efforts to defend its militaristic interests by continually circulating self-serving rhetoric, which Nguyen defines as "ideas, ideologies, fantasies, and words that justify war, the sacrifices of our side, and the death of others" (2016a, 106). There is much at stake in this project, given that the United States has frequently used US-centric Vietnam War narratives to justify the damaging global exportation of its cultural, economic, and political values alongside neo-imperialist military intervention abroad not just in Vietnam but also in many Global South nations. In the remaining sections of this essay, I will show how The Sympathizer enacts this political project by employing metatextual techniques that problematize how unjust memory practices are dependent upon narrative manipulation for their power. By uncovering this dependency, the novel asks how we might move beyond weaponizing language for the purpose of justifying racist, imperialist, and jingoistic acts of violence and instead employ language as a revolutionary platform for building a more just world in which war is no longer considered inevitable in human society. In doing so, the novel meditates upon the relationship between language and the industrialization of memory, which is particularly urgent in a contemporary US society characterized by an upsurge in anti-intellectualism, censorship, fake news, and polarized rhetoric, all of which directly fuel nationalistic identity politics that obstruct the ability of the United States to critically assess the harm caused by its global hegemony.

A MIXED-RACE MOLE IN THE MARGINS

One of the most salient ways that The Sympathizer seeks to rewrite Vietnam War history through the lens of just memory is by featuring a narrator whose dual identity, first as a person of mixed-race heritage and second as a communist spy, establishes him as a figure of metatextuality. This dual identity relegates the narrator to a position of social liminality, such that he is constantly being read by others but never accurately interpreted. He thus serves as an embodiment of metatextuality, given that he is continually made [End Page 64] aware of his status as an ambiguous signifier who can be variably deciphered depending on context. This ambiguity allows him to move across American, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese spaces yet never find acceptance in any of them. Cast outside these groups, the narrator comes to understand that, despite their self-declared differences, these parties share a critical similarity in that they all craft self-serving narratives to rationalize unjust memory practices. These self-serving narratives are founded upon binary us-versus-them logic, a central tenet of unjust memory that does not allow for the possibility of flexible identities, shades of nuance, or blurred lines—all of which coexist within the narrator's metatextual body. It is his very metatextuality, then, that helps the narrator recognize the falseness of such binary logic, since he understands that surface appearances can be misleading and that a person can occupy multiple identity categories at once without invalidating any single one of them. In recognizing the falseness of such binary logic, the narrator is primed to imagine (and eventually model) the possibility of creating new forms of sociality undefined by exclusionary group divisions.

From the moment of his illegitimate birth to a French priest and Vietnamese peasant, the narrator is pushed to the margins of Vietnamese society. Born in 1945, the same year that Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam's independence from France, the narrator is ostracized by his fellow Vietnamese nationals, who view his existence as an affront to their efforts to free the nation from French occupation. As a result, the narrator grows up in the shadow of shame as a socially rejected embodiment of the legacy of French imperialism.4 Doomed to suffer from the stigma of having mixed-race ancestry in a country yearning for monoculture, the narrator develops a dual identity that finds analogous parallels in the division of Vietnam by Western imperialism. The narrator highlights these parallels by stating,

We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies. 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.

(Nguyen 2015, 361) [End Page 65]

In this reflection, the narrator highlights his inborn metatextuality by noting that his biracial status subjects him to the scrutiny of monoracial others, who continually (mis)read him as unacceptable because he appears divided into two incompatible sides. Yet he does not merely lament his social rejection; he also links his own history of being shunned by his fellow nationals to his homeland's broader history of being torn apart by the occupation of Western imperialists. In drawing this parallel, the narrator demonstrates that both his ostracism and Vietnam's colonization are byproducts of the same binary us-versus-them logic, which refuses to allow for the possibility of hybridity or multiplicity and instead fuels supremacist narratives that justify the subjugation of others. As a social pariah, the narrator is uniquely positioned to recognize that this logic forms the basis of the unjust memory practices of both Vietnam's Western colonizers and Vietnam itself, all of whom insist on drawing nonnegotiable lines to demarcate their in-group as superior to all out-groups. The narrator's metatextuality as a biracial subject, then, primes him to challenge the unjust memory industries of not only the Western imperial nations that have "debased" his homeland but also those of Vietnam itself, as he refuses to accept either the narratives produced by "white men wearing suits and lies" that remember French colonization as a mission civilisatrice and US military intervention as a defense of democracy, or the narratives of a "postpartum" Vietnam that stubbornly imagine the nation's (re) birth as devoid of imperial influence.

While painful, the narrator's social exclusion eventually enables him to recognize the artificiality of identity politics. Denounced as a bastard throughout his life, the narrator is first called this slur as a boy during a family gathering to celebrate the Lunar New Year, when tradition calls for adults to give children red envelopes of lucky money. In a particularly agonizing moment, the narrator's Aunt Two makes a point to deny him a red envelope to publicly disavow him as a legitimate family member. This insult is compounded by the narrator's later discovery that the little money he did receive from his other aunts and uncles constitutes only half the amount bestowed upon the rest of his cousins. One cousin explains this outcome to the narrator: "That's because you're half-blooded[.] […] You're a bastard" (Nguyen 2015, 141). This rejection marks one of the narrator's earliest memories of being mistreated by others due to being (mis)read as unworthy of inclusion; thus, this moment is distinctly metatextual, as it draws explicit attention to the narrator's status as [End Page 66] an open signifier whose bodily features are subject to interpretation. Several years later, as an adolescent, the narrator shares this traumatic memory with his close friends Bon and Man, the only people in his life (aside from his mother) who accept him despite his mixed-race ancestry. In seeking to comfort the narrator, Man offers an insightful speech:

The red envelope is a symbol […] of all that's wrong. It's the color of blood, and they singled you out for your blood. It's the color of fortune and luck. Those are primitive beliefs. We don't succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do. They take advantage of things, like your cousins, and they don't question things. As long as things work for them, then they support those things. 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. Red is revolution.

Man's impassioned speech sparks the narrator's interest in communist revolution and sets him on his path to becoming a spy. Spurned by his own family, the narrator finds Man's denunciation of the red envelope and all that it symbolizes (money, deception, rejection) to be seductively appealing. As the narrator listens to Man offer an alternative perspective that casts the narrator's familial ostracism not as a sign of his own weakness but rather as a sign of his family's inability to "see the lie" of social inequity, he experiences a critical turning point in which his racialization fuels his politicization. In this moment of self-realization that his mixed-race ancestry is a direct cause of his exclusion from both his family and Vietnamese society, the narrator recognizes what his monoracial family members cannot: that the status quo is unsatisfactory for those relegated to the margins of society and that there are multiple shades of meaning to any situation. As he reflects on Man's words, the narrator experiences an epiphany: "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" (142). As Pat Hoy explains, in this moment the narrator comes to understand the "inherent danger of fixed ideas" (2015, 688). This epiphany brings the narrator closer to recognizing the ambiguity of signifiers (such as words, symbols, or even physical bodies), which can yield multiple meanings and therefore be viewed as meaningless. Even as the narrator yearns for acceptance, he also begins to understand that [End Page 67] membership within any group is performative, given that identity affiliations are artificially constructed and thus inherently political.

The narrator's awareness of how identity is artificially constructed proves to be an asset in his future career as a mole, which demands that he continually blur the line between reality and performance. This line eventually becomes so hazy that the narrator often cannot discern the difference between his own beliefs and those of his assigned character, a captain in the South Vietnamese army, reflecting at one point "that sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face" (Nguyen 2015, 136). This uncertainty is reinforced by the ambiguity of the very word "mole," which the narrator comes to learn has multiple meanings. Upon first hearing this word during an English class, he initially thinks the teacher is referring to the mammal that buries underground, but the teacher explains that this word has a secondary meaning of spy and a tertiary meaning of beauty spot. In explaining these different meanings, the teacher offers a play on words:

To think of a mole as that which digs underground misunderstands the meaning of the mole as a spy. A spy's task is not to hide himself where no one can see him, since he will not be able to see anything himself. A spy's task is to hide where everyone can see him and where he can see everything. Now ask yourself: What can everyone see about you but you yourself cannot?

Enough with the riddles, I said. I give up.

There—he pointed at the middle of my face—in plain sight. I went to the mirror to see for myself, Man peering over my shoulder. There it indeed was, such a part of myself I had long ago ceased to notice it. Keep in mind that you will be not just any mole, Man said, but the mole that is the beauty spot on the nose of power itself.

In this exchange, the teacher explains that, like the animal that digs underground, the spy must keep his true identity buried beneath a false exterior; yet like the beauty spot that adorns the face, the spy must also remain plainly visible. This role's contradictory nature becomes even more apparent when the narrator later consults his English dictionary and discovers many other definitions for the word "mole," which "could also be a kind of pier or harbor, a unit of measurement in chemistry, an abnormal mass of uterine tissue, and, if pronounced differently, a highly spiced Mexican sauce of peppers and chocolate" (174). In this moment of metatextuality, as he watches the word "mole" splinter into a multiplicity of definitions, [End Page 68] the narrator cannot help but recognize how all representation is performative, given that the boundaries of any identity, group, or ideology are necessarily dependent upon the capriciousness of language. This revelation is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the narrator's own lived experiences as a spy who must continually convince others that he is whom he says he is through the constant repetition of discursive labor.

Doubly fragmented, first by his ancestry and second by his profession, the narrator becomes further entrenched in adulthood as a cipher who is continually misinterpreted by others, demonstrating on the level of the body the challenges of rhetorical interpretation. Like the word "mole," the narrator defies clear definition, noting that he is highly skilled at "remaining as unreadable as a paper package wrapped up with string" (Nguyen 2015, 128). Other characters routinely gaze upon the narrator but fail to recognize some critical aspect of his identity, a phenomenon that is additionally complicated by the narrator's own confusion about himself. Although he identifies as a communist, the narrator is often not recognized as such by others who share his ideology; this unsettling experience occurs when the narrator interrogates a female communist agent in his disguise as a South Vietnamese captain and notes, "For just a moment I saw the truth in her eyes, and the truth was that she hated me for what she thought I was, the agent of an oppressive regime" (9–10). In being misread as an enemy rather than a comrade, the narrator realizes that his disguise is so convincing that it can fool even one of his own. Later, the narrator discovers that his masquerade's impermeability has ensnared him so fully that he cannot even achieve true recognition by openly confessing to his communist allegiances. At one point, for example, he attempts to reveal the truth of his communist identity to a fellow refugee and potential communist sympathizer named Sonny but, much to his dismay, is dismissed with incredulity (275). In other moments when the narrator interacts with Americans, he is misread as a stereotype, viewed as neither of his self-declared identities (a captain or a communist) but rather as some combination of ignorant or pitiful. Unable to read his body beyond the filter of white supremacy, Americans routinely ask him how he "learned to speak English so well" or characterize him as a tragic mulatto (7, 63–65). The narrator's illegibility reflects a phenomenon that Nguyen terms "disremembering," a byproduct of unjust memory that "allows someone to see right through the other" such that "the other who is disremembered" is "simultaneously seen [End Page 69] and not seen" (2016a, 63; emphasis original). Being subjected to such disremembering is an inevitable consequence not only of the narrator's existence in the liminal space of duality but also of the other characters' insistence on viewing him through the binary logic of unjust memory, which does not recognize the possibility of complex hybrid identities. In being continually misread and disremembered, the narrator struggles to define himself while also recognizing that the very act of self-definition is performative. In this way, the narrator can be understood as a deracinated figure, defined by his (dis) location outside of any single identity group and thus primed to recognize the seductive yet deceptive logic of binarism that fuels unjust memory, a phenomenon that I will unpack more fully in the next section.

MODELS OF UNJUST MEMORY: SELF-SERVING NARRATIVES AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

The Sympathizer's critique of unjust memory is mediated through yet another aspect of its metatextuality: its nested narrative form, which embeds within the narrator's larger confession testimonies from various American, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese characters whom he encounters. The voices of these characters intermix with each other to create what Mikhail Bakhtin calls "heteroglossia," a distinguishing stylistic feature of the novel in which a "diversity of speech types" combine to express "a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief systems" (1981, 263, 288). This heteroglossia establishes the narrator's written confession as a palimpsest featuring the various discourses of the different parties involved in the Vietnam War. Such heteroglossia makes visible the striking fact that these groups all seek to control memory by advancing self-serving narratives that glorify their actions as heroic, no matter how egregiously such actions violate the basic human rights of others.

Although these parties believe they are unique, the novel's nested narrative form exposes how uncannily similar their self-serving narratives are, indicating that they are in fact not so different from each other, particularly in their attempts to manipulate memory. In quoting from these different groups, the narrator demonstrates that their words are often nearly identical in style, vocabulary, and form—and thus, that their ideologies are merely recycled versions of each other. The slogan of the North Vietnamese communist party, Ho Chi [End Page 70] Minh's declaration that nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, is reminiscent of the discourse of American liberty, which is routinely voiced by the American characters, such as a US congressman who quotes John Quincy Adams (in turn enacting his own rhetorical regurgitation) by saying, "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [America's] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be … She […] is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all" (Nguyen 2015, 259). Another time, this congressman addresses a congregation of Vietnamese refugees and ends his speech by leading the audience in a chant of "Vietnam Muon Nam!" ("Vietnam Forever!"), prompting Sonny to comment to the narrator, "Funny, […] [i]t's the same slogan the Communist Party uses" (119–20). Here Sonny identifies as ironic the fact that both the American politician and South Vietnamese refugees are reiterating the same patriotic language used by their self-declared enemies. In thus exposing how in parallel fashion the Americans, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese discursively delineate the boundaries of their group identities, the narrator highlights the constructedness of this practice, implicitly denouncing as an extension of unjust memory self-aggrandizing language that falsely imagines the self as human and the other as inhuman.

Despite their similarities, these parties' attempts to exert influence by manipulating narrative are not equitable, as the imbalanced distribution of power among the Americans, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese informs the impact of their competing memory industries. As discussed earlier, the United States uses its hegemonic might to wield a global unjust memory campaign, casting itself as a heroic defender of liberty and rationalizing decades of destructive military intervention in Vietnam. In a refusal to reinforce such "polarized narratives of Third World helpless victim and First World heroic savior," The Sympathizer exposes the dark underbelly of US imperialism by revealing how the United States' memory industry sanitizes the history of US intervention in Vietnam (Goyal 2018, 379). The novel opens with an event rarely depicted in popular US representations of the war, which typically gloss over any failures of the US military: the United States' defeat at the hands of Ho Chi Minh's army, marked by the inglorious exodus of US troops from Saigon in April 1975. The narrator describes how, at this critical time, mass confusion reigned among the South Vietnamese civilians who were desperate but unable to escape the country due to the US government's failure to arrange effective evacuation procedures. [End Page 71] This incompetence was the result of the US government's hubris in refusing to prepare for defeat; unwilling to accept the possibility of military failure, the US government did not begin planning to evacuate refugees until March 1975, one month before Saigon was taken over by the North Vietnamese army, which provided little time for the US military to organize an efficient large-scale evacuation (Pelaud 2010, 9). To highlight this negligence, the narrator describes not only the US military's failure to provide the resources necessary for a safe evacuation but also its cowardice in hastily pulling out of the country and leaving the South Vietnamese people to fend for themselves. Although the narrator's status as a communist spy prompts him to feel "pleased" about the communist takeover of Saigon, he also cannot "help but feel moved by the plight of these poor [South Vietnamese] people" (Nguyen 2015, 3). In an expression of his sympathy, the narrator voices the shock of the South Vietnamese population, using the collective pronoun "we" to signal his identification with this community:

We could not believe that the Americans—our friends, our benefactors, our protectors—had spurned our request to send more money. And what would we have done with that money? Buy the ammunition, gas, and spare parts for the weapons, planes, and tanks the same Americans had bestowed on us for free. Having given us the needles, they now perversely no longer supplied the dope.

By using dashes to separate and thus highlight the anaphoric phrase "our friends, our benefactors, our protectors," the narrator adopts a bitter tone that subverts the legitimacy of these descriptors. Abandoning the South Vietnamese people after rendering them dependent on US weapons is a far cry from the expected behavior of a friend, benefactor, or protector—and a notable contradiction to the image of American heroism glorified by the US memory industry.

One example of nested narration—the firsthand testimony of an American CIA agent named Claude recounting his flight from Vietnam—further highlights the ignobility of the United States' exodus. Claude describes returning to the evacuation site from an unsuccessful search in the Saigon streets for his Vietnamese lover only to find a crowd of would-be evacuees begging for a spot on the next aircraft out of the country. Fearful that he may not make it through the throng to board the next plane, Claude resorts to physical violence to advance: [End Page 72]

The people in front of me couldn't see I was an American and no one was turning around just because I was tapping them on the shoulder, so I yanked them by the hair, or pulled them by the ear, or grabbed them by the shirt collar to haul them out of my way. I've never done anything like that in my life. I was too proud to scream at first, but it didn't take long before I was screaming, too. Let me through, I'm an American, goddammit. I finally got myself to that wall, and when those marines reached down and grabbed my hand and pulled me up, I damn near cried again. […] I was never so ashamed in my life, but I was also never so goddamn glad to be an American, either.

Here Claude confesses to acts of cowardice that contradict the popular image of American agents as heroes ready to bring the so-called light of democratic liberty to the supposedly uncivilized East. He uses his status as a US national to justify his violent movement through the crowd, yet his admission of shame at committing such an act suggests that he understands his US citizenship bears no legitimate cause for pride. Claude's characterization in this critical moment, then, serves to recast the (white, male) American agent as driven by the cowardly desire for self-preservation—quite the opposite of his usual US-sponsored image as a pillar of superhuman bravery. Through the nested narration of Claude's testimony, then, the novel further exposes the falseness of the United States' unjust memory practices, which would seek to deny that an American intelligence officer like Claude could demonstrate such levels of cravenness.

The Sympathizer continues to problematize the United States' unjust memory industry by recounting the narrator's disruptive transition to refugee life, which is far from the smooth, integrative experience that popular US narratives imagine it to be. Forced to evacuate to the United States to maintain his cover as a South Vietnamese captain, the narrator must endure the demoralizing condition of statelessness. As a refugee, he faces routine subjection to racist comments by xenophobic Americans, grows psychologically distressed, develops substance abuse habits to cope with his trauma, and suffers from nostalgia for his prewar homeland. Such experiences prompt the narrator to reflect sardonically, "I was thankful, truly! But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid" (Nguyen 2015, 62). This remark captures the narrator's pain at having to express [End Page 73] gratitude to the very people whose self-interested actions brought about his displacement. By presenting his painful refugee experience as a direct consequence of US intervention, the narrator exposes as false the US memory industry's characterization of American intervention in Vietnam as humanitarian.

Perhaps the most notable example of how the United States deploys the full force of its memory industry to reimagine itself as a heroic victor comes in the form of a Hollywood film about the Vietnam War for which the narrator serves as a consultant, a film that bears a pointed resemblance to Apocalypse Now. In centering the perspectives of American soldiers and reducing Vietnamese characters to flattened stereotypes, this film deploys many of the tactics of unjust memory, prompting the narrator to reflect bitterly that the Vietnam War would be "the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created" (Nguyen 2015, 134). Upon first meeting the Auteur in charge of creating this film, the narrator is struck by his limited knowledge of Vietnam, the very country that his film is supposed to represent. When the narrator attempts to point out that the Auteur "didn't get the details right," the Auteur retorts defensively, "I researched your country, my friend. I read Joseph Buttinger and Frances FitzGerald. Have you read Joseph Buttinger and Frances FitzGerald. He's the foremost historian on your little part of the world. And she won the Pulitzer Prize. She dissected your psychology. I think I know something about you people" (130). In dismissing the possibility that the narrator might be a greater authority on Vietnam than Western scholars, the Auteur makes it clear that his film will reproduce Eurocentric perspectives that have been established as truth by the orientalist Western academy. The Auteur understands that he does not need to depict Vietnam realistically because, as a major operative within the US memory industry's machinery, he has the power to define what is real—or, as he puts it, to create a "great work of art" that is "as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real" (178). In this way, the film draws metatextual attention to how truth is constructed through narrative, as whoever has the means to control historical memory has the power to dictate truth.

This power to construct reality grants the Auteur a godlike status, a fact that he proudly boasts in another example of nested narration as he meditates upon the Hollywood sign visible from his Hollywood Hills home: [End Page 74]

See the view. I'm talking about the Hollywood sign right there. Never get tired of it. Like the Word of God just dropped down, plunked on the hills, and the Word was Hollywood. Didn't God say let there be light first. What's a movie but light. Can't have a movie without light. And then words. Seeing that sign reminds me to write every morning. What. All right, so it doesn't say Hollywood. You got me. Good eye. Thing's falling to pieces. One O's half fallen and the other O's fallen altogether. The word's gone to shit. So what. You still get the meaning.

Here the Auteur infuses his industry with divine origins, fantasizing that Hollywood was pronounced into existence by the "Word of God." In doing so, he suggests that writing is a heavenly act and thus, as one of the creative minds who writes Hollywood films into being, he himself can be understood as a deity in miniature. He cares little that the symbol of his godlike status, the Hollywood sign, is incomplete, with one "O" dangling crooked and the other "O" missing entirely because, as he explains, the meaning of the sign is still legible. For the Auteur, the physical sign is less important than what the sign represents—or, put differently, the signified is more meaningful than the signifier. The Auteur's smug confidence here is understandable, given that the power of Hollywood is so absolute that its products have a worldwide reach regardless of their quality. Yet given that this moment of nested narration is mediated through the narrator's perspective, the Auteur's assessment comes across as deluded. Under the narrator's scrutinizing gaze, the Hollywood sign's disrepair becomes more important than its meaning. In demonstrating such contradictory interpretations of the same signifier, The Sympathizer offers metatextual commentary on the inherent flaws of writing as a medium—the very medium that supposedly grants Hollywood its godlike power. Words may be political symbols, as is the Holly-wood sign, but they are also unreliable signifiers that are susceptible to deconstruction, as is evident in the sign's state of disintegration. It is not incidental that the two fallen letters are both "O," a visual representation of a hole that further suggests language's potential for open interpretation. In presenting the deteriorating sign as an indication of both the constructedness of language and its potential for deconstruction, the novel draws attention to the holes in the armor of Hollywood's machinery and raises questions about how the US memory industry's propagandistic narratives might be subverted.

The United States is not the only nation that practices unjust memory by advancing self-serving narratives, as both the South [End Page 75] and North Vietnamese governments also seek to construct memory industries that are as self-aggrandizing as the United States', albeit significantly less far-reaching due to their limited power and resources. Through the nested narration of various South and North Vietnamese characters, The Sympathizer fictionalizes how these competing parties have sought to control public memory of the war within their own communities. As a member of the South Vietnamese diaspora in the United States, the narrator directly witnesses how the refugee community constructs what Espiritu describes as "highly complex and contingent commemoration efforts to counter an erasure of the history of the Republic of Vietnam while denouncing the US betrayal of its former allies as well as the failure of Vietnamese communism" (2014, 137). Such efforts are modeled perhaps no more clearly than by the General of the South Vietnamese army, whose dogged commitment to anti-communist ideology reflects a popular tendency among South Vietnamese refugees to "remember the Republic of Vietnam as only free and democratic, North Vietnam as only ruthless and communist" (138). Troublingly, the General's unwavering belief in the righteousness of the Republic and the evils of communism makes him susceptible to confirmation bias. Whenever the General learns of information that supports his anti-communist beliefs, he uncritically believes it, such as when he reads newspaper reports about the suffering of Southeast Asian refugees as, in his words, indisputable "evidence that those communist bastards are purging the country!" (Nguyen 2015, 160). In contrast, whenever he encounters rhetoric that seems remotely pro-communist, he goes to great lengths to suppress it. For example, when Sonny, who runs a Vietnamese-language newspaper, publishes an editorial urging the diaspora to accept that the war is over, the General begins to view Sonny as a potential threat and seeks to pressure him into changing the political tone of his writings. When Sonny continues to publish editorials that criticize the General's plan to reanimate the South Vietnamese army in the United States and launch a return mission to Vietnam, the General decides that he must be a communist sympathizer and commands the narrator to execute him. In sentencing Sonny to death, the General demonstrates that he believes his republican beliefs grant him the moral authority to use violence to define the dominant narratives that circulate within his diasporic community.

Through the nested narration of the novel's North Vietnamese characters, it becomes clear that the postwar government is [End Page 76] also running a similar campaign of unjust memory, characterizing all actions in the name of communism as heroic and all efforts to oppose communism as villainous. This one-sided narrative fails to recognize the many human rights violations committed by North Vietnamese leadership; according to Caroline Kieu-Linh Valverde, in the months after Saigon's fall, the new communist government implemented violent policies that "targeted individuals and family members of those involved with the United States, South Vietnamese military, landowners, and Chinese Vietnamese. Punishment included confiscation of property or land, discrimination in the workforce and education, detainment, incarceration, and expulsion to desolate lands known as New Economic Zones" (2012, 9). Even while enacting such cruelties, the postwar government sought to characterize itself as a valiant champion, placing "great emphasis on centralizing and controlling commemorative practices" so as to present an image of a unified Vietnamese state born from "a genealogy of heroic resistance wars against foreign powers" (Kwon 2006, 4). In the months after capturing Saigon, the postwar government carefully cultivated this image by erecting exhibition houses to publicly document the atrocities committed by the United States, which were later converted into museums that sought to memorialize "the nation's two-thousand-year history of continuous uprisings against invaders, and invincibility in the face of powerful enemies"; in doing so, the government crafted an official national history that "is not only defensive in action, but also victorious in outcome, and thus elides stories of suffering and defeat" (Schwenkel 2009, 152).5 Notably, these commemorative practices erase the many abuses committed by the postwar government, which the narrator of The Sympathizer comes to experience firsthand when he is captured by North Vietnamese soldiers during his return mission to Vietnam and imprisoned for a year in a reeducation camp. Throughout his incarceration and torture at the hands of fellow communists, the narrator discovers that the North Vietnamese government continues to recycle the same self-serving narratives and domineering tactics as its Western forebears, thus failing to deliver on its promise of liberating the Vietnamese people from imperialist oppression. Instead, the narrator notes that, far from producing true freedom for the people, the revolutionaries seem to fear one another, which directly contradicts the communist vision that party members should be equally respected comrades. The explanation for this contradiction given by the commandant overseeing the narrator's imprisonment—that [End Page 77] "not all comrades have the same level of ideological consciousness"—comes across as rather disturbing, given that these words describe a hierarchical command structure based on differing levels of enlightenment rather than the equitable distribution of authority that the communist revolution promised (Nguyen 2015, 321). This hierarchy exposes the meaninglessness of the North Vietnamese government's communist ideology, which has been used not to liberate the people but rather to consolidate power for its leaders.

In one of the clearest moments of metatextuality in the novel, the commandant of the reeducation camp asserts ongoing control over the writing of the narrator's confession, demanding edits that would make this manuscript conform more clearly to the North Vietnamese government's self-serving narratives. The commandant, who is described by the narrator as a "diligent editor, always ready to note my many errata and digressions and always urging me to delete, excise, reword, or add," routinely expresses dissatisfaction that the narrator's writing does not appropriately adhere to the conventions of the confessional genre in refusing to assert unequivocal allegiance to the North Vietnamese government (Nguyen 2015, 308). The commandant explains, "Confessions are as much about style as content, as the Red Guards have shown us. All we ask for is a certain way with words," before offering an example of what this desired style and content might look like by suggesting that the narrator cite more communist thinkers (312). In demanding that the narrator regurgitate the rhetoric of other communists, the commandant seeks to stifle the competing Western and South Vietnamese perspectives mediated through the narrator's writing, largely because he views these alternative perspectives as potentially threatening to the ideological hegemony of the North Vietnamese government. As he puts it, "You have traveled to strange lands and been exposed to some dangerous ideas. It wouldn't do to bring infectious ideas into a country unused to them. Think of the people, insulated for so long from foreign ideas. Exposure could lead to a real catastrophe for minds that aren't ready for them" (309). In shaping the narrator's manuscript through careful editing, the commandant shows that he, like the Hollywood Auteur and South Vietnamese General, fancies himself to be infused with the authority to dictate dominant narratives (at least those circulating within the limited confines of his reeducation camp) and to silence all competing perspectives. [End Page 78]

While these North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and American nested narratives differ in their choice of casting for the role of enemy, they share the same basic storyline of glorifying their own people as heroes struggling to advance liberation. As a socially marginalized figure who witnesses firsthand how these self-interested narratives are constructed, the narrator recognizes that each group's rhetorical manipulation serves to fuel a self-serving campaign of unjust memory. Equipped with this ability, the narrator eventually seeks to rewrite the history of the war from the more ethical lens of just memory, a project that takes final shape in the form of the manuscript that is The Sympathizer itself and that serves as the central focus of my analysis in the next section.

TOWARD JUST MEMORY: HUMANITY, INHUMANITY, AND COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

I have thus far demonstrated that in being exposed to a heteroglossia of American, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese testimonies, along with being denied belonging to any of these groups, the narrator comes to recognize that all parties involved in the war commit acts of violence that are morally condemnable as inhumane, yet routinely seek to justify such acts as valorous. In this section, I will show that even as he directly suffers from these egregious behaviors, he still feels sympathy for these parties because he understands that committing inhumane acts is part of what it means to be human. In expressing such sympathy, the narrator puts into practice what Nguyen in Nothing Ever Dies explains is a quintessential part of a true project of just memory: recognizing that "being human also means being inhuman," since "[t]o be a subject, rather than to be an other, means that one can be guilty" of committing violence (2016a, 72, 76). Nguyen warns that it is not enough to "remember the humanity of others and forget their inhumanity," as this constitutes a superficially liberal form of just memory that risks reducing the other to an object of pity rather than recognizing the complexity of the other's humanity (96). To achieve a truly ethical project of remembrance, we must avoid simplifying the other and instead acknowledge that the other, like us, is also "capable of dying and killing, of tragedy and guilt, of the whole panoply of human and inhuman action and feeling" (97). In The Sympathizer, the narrator models this kind of ethical recognition by framing the American, South Vietnamese, [End Page 79] and North Vietnamese parties as human precisely because they are capable of being inhuman, a move that allows him to powerfully advance The Sympathizer's larger project of rewriting the history of the Vietnam War from the lens of just memory.

All these parties demonstrate inhumanity by mutually enacting torture, murder, and rape. The narrator observes that such brutal behaviors have become so normalized that they are often considered less obscene than sex, noting, "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'" (Nguyen 2015, 80). Regardless of whose company he keeps, the narrator is forced to witness, participate in, or personally endure horrific acts of violence, all committed in the name of independence and freedom. Sometimes the narrator takes a passive role in these acts, such as when, in his undercover role in the South Vietnamese army, he watches a commanding officer torture a Montagnard rumored to have served as a liaison agent for the Viet Cong and, later, witnesses three South Vietnamese policemen gang rape a female communist agent (131, 350–52). Other times he takes on a more active role, such as when, under Claude's tutelage, he helps torture a North Vietnamese operative nicknamed the Watchman so effectively that the man commits suicide to escape his suffering (190–93). Such brutality follows the narrator to his new life in the United States, where, under the General's command, he is compelled to murder two fellow Vietnamese nationals whom the General suspects to be communist spies: Sonny and a Chinese officer nicknamed the crapulent major (109, 276–78). In openly confessing to his direct participation in these violent crimes, the narrator notably includes himself among the cast of characters who commit inhuman acts. Still other times the narrator himself becomes a victim of violence, such as when he is nearly killed in an explosion deliberately authorized by the Auteur on the set of the Hollywood film or when he is tortured by North Vietnamese soldiers in the reeducation camp. Hovering in the backdrop of all these brutal acts is the specter of the most egregious perpetrator of inhuman violence: the US military, which doles out unparalleled levels of destruction through a combination of "supersonic fighters, napalm, white phosphorous artillery shells, aircraft carriers, strategic bombers, herbicides, and helicopters equipped with so-called miniguns that could fire six thousand rounds per minute in a blaze of lightning and thunder" (Nguyen 2016a, 170). [End Page 80]

Despite such irrefutable evidence of the inhumanity of these parties, the narrator nonetheless expresses sympathy for them all (true to his titular role as "the sympathizer"), perhaps because he recognizes, as someone who has engaged in brutality himself, that all humans are capable of being inhuman. In doing so, he rejects the binary logic of unjust memory expressed by these different parties, who view themselves as fully justified in committing violence but denounce their declared enemies for employing similar tactics. In contrast, the narrator models an alternative ethics of just memory predicated on his ability to sympathize despite witnessing inhuman action, putting into practice his mother's teaching that "blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior" (Nguyen 2015, 36).

Ironically, the narrator is unable to access the full possibilities of just memory until he suffers one of the most severe forms of violence: torture. It is not incidental that his torture is presented as a textual experience given the self-reflexive, metafictional quality at the heart of The Sympathizer's political project. The commissar overseeing the narrator's torture, who also happens to be the narrator's childhood friend Man, explains that he has taken inspiration from a CIA manual entitled KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, which details all the torture strategies used on the narrator. Since this manual was once owned by the narrator, who originally received it from Claude during his interrogation training days, Man is not only modeling the narrator's torture after ideas printed in a book but also after the "marginal notes" and "underlined passages" within the book that constitute the narrator's commentary on these ideas (Nguyen 2015, 344). In this way, the narrator's torture is filtered through a triple layer of mediation: first through the textbook, second through his own interpretation of the textbook, and third through Man's interpretation of his interpretation. Notably, the KUBARK manual adopts the conventions of a dictionary, featuring "definitions of several character types the interrogator was likely to meet," which suggests that torture does not unfold organically but rather is dictated by a script that assigns the torturer and tortured to specific roles (284). Even the goal of torture is inspired by textual analysis, as the doctor assisting Man explains that the reason for brutalizing the narrator through sleep deprivation is to help him "observe himself as someone else. This is most crucial, for we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It's as if [End Page 81] our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read" (342). Given that the narrator's identity has been routinely misread throughout his life, this analogy is particularly provocative, suggesting that the inhuman act of torture might be the only avenue through which the narrator can finally be accurately read.

Since torture is rendered textual, it is unsurprising that after enduring this suffering the narrator makes a rhetorical discovery: that "every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea" (Nguyen 2015, 371). This realization helps him conclude that the slogan nothing is more important than independence and freedom has two meanings: the negative meaning, "as in there's nothing there," and the positive meaning, "the paradoxical fact that nothing is, indeed, something" (371; emphasis original). In this moment of clarity, he finally sees the meaninglessness of his country's communist revolution, reflecting,

I understood, at last, how our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power. In this transformation, we were not unusual. Hadn't the French and the Americans done exactly the same? Once revolutionaries themselves, they had become imperialists, colonizing and occupying our defiant little land, taking away our freedom in the name of saving us. Our revolution took considerably longer than theirs, and was considerably bloodier, but we made up for lost time. When it came to learning the worst habits of our French masters and their American replacements, we quickly proved ourselves the best. We, too, could abuse grand ideals! Having liberated ourselves in the name of independence and freedom—I was so tired of saying these words!—we then deprived our defeated brethren of the same.

Besides a man with no face, only a man of two minds could get this joke, about how a revolution fought for independence and freedom could make those things worth less than nothing.

(Nguyen 2015, 376; emphasis original)6

In identifying a pattern of abuse that links together the actions of the French, Americans, and Vietnamese, the narrator fully exposes the corrupting influence of language that seeks to establish supremacy over all others. The idealistic notions of liberation and freedom, he realizes, ring hollow in a system—whether colonial, communist, or republican—that is predicated on binary frameworks and a refusal to see the humanity in others and the inhumanity in oneself. Since the binary logic of identity politics is based on rhetoric that [End Page 82] delineates the boundaries of us versus them, the narrator's discovery that exclusionary rhetoric is a "joke" finally frees him from the pain of seeking belonging in any one group. Instead, he embraces his identity as a person characterized by duality and sympathy who exists outside of the limitations of group membership and, by extension, ideology. To signify his self-acceptance on the level of form, he begins using the plural pronoun "we" to refer to himself in the novel's final pages, thus reimagining himself as a collective consciousness (a "we" rather than an "I"). Remaking himself in this way is only possible after being first unmade through torture because, as Elaine Scarry explains, torture "destroys a person's self and world" since "in serious pain the claims of the body utterly nullify the claims of the world" (1985, 35, 33). In this way, the textual experience of torture suggests a relationship between not only violence and narrative but also language and identity formation.

If to achieve just memory we must no longer believe that the self is different from the other, then in remaking himself by rejecting the binary logic of identity politics, the narrator fully opens himself up to the possibility of enacting a true project of ethical remembrance. This project manifests as the narrator's final manuscript (presented as The Sympathizer itself), which he describes as his "best attempt to represent ourselves against all those who sought to represent us" (Nguyen 2015, 380). On the last page of this manuscript, the narrator reaffirms his commitment to revolution, declaring, "Despite it all—yes, despite everything, in the face of nothing—we still consider ourselves revolutionary" (382; emphasis original). Here the term "revolutionary" takes on new meaning in yet another metatextual reflection of the multiplicity of language. Redefined beyond the limitations of identity politics, the narrator no longer identifies as a communist revolutionary but rather as a revolutionary who seeks to reimagine human society through a framework of ethical representation. In this way, the narrator achieves what can be understood as the final pillar of just memory: using art (in the form of his manuscript) to imagine new possibilities for the future in which othering is no longer considered inevitable in human society. My concluding argument here builds upon Nguyen's assertion that art offers a critical platform for imagining these possibilities because it serves as the "template for reflective, contemplative, meditative thinking and feeling that might allow us to become citizens of the imagination" (2016a, 286). The Sympathizer offers this kind of template, inviting us to consider how we might move beyond self-serving ideologies and [End Page 83] instead imagine new forms of sociality based on mutual recognition and collective consciousness.

Roberta Wolfson

ROBERTA WOLFSON is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century multiethnic US literatures, antiracist rhetoric, risk and security studies, and critical mixed-race studies. Her scholarly work appears in MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), American Literature, African American Review, and The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction and she is currently working on a book project that considers how writers of color engage antiracist counternarratives to challenge the violence of the contemporary US security state.

NOTES

1. Nothing Ever Dies can be read alongside both The Sympathizer and Viet Thanh Nguyen's short story collection, The Refugees, as a part of a single project. Although Nothing Ever Dies was technically published the year after The Sympathizer, Nguyen worked on it before the novel from 2002 to 2011. As a result, Nguyen has stated that the questions about historical memory and ethical representation addressed in Nothing Ever Dies were influential for the writing of The Sympathizer (Nguyen and Fung 2017, 206).

2. I am not unmindful of the fact that several other superpowers, such as China and the Soviet Union, also participated in the military intervention of Vietnam. However, since the United States was the primary aggressor, and for the purposes of limiting the scope of my analysis, I am focusing exclusively on the United States as the main exemplar of a superpower that has constructed an unjust memory industry to justify its role in the destruction of Vietnam.

3. Contrary to Jimmy Carter's claim, the destruction in Vietnam was anything but mutual; while the United States lost 60,000 soldiers, Vietnam lost an estimated 2 million civilians, 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers, and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers.

4. Nguyen offers further commentary on France's colonization of Vietnam in the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed. In an interview, Nguyen gave the following summary of the sequel's plot: "The second novel deals with an even longer history of what Vietnam has meant to the West. In the sequel, the narrator goes to Paris, because that is the land of his father, and he confronts the history of French colonialism and the rhetoric of French civilizing discourse there. I want to add to the picture that I drew in the first novel, by thinking about ways the West has exercised its power globally and in Asia, so that what the U.S. did, did not happen in isolation, but took place as a sequel to what the French had already done in Vietnam" (2016b, 71).

5. These exhibition houses include the Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes, which opened on September 4, 1975, in the newly named Ho Chi Minh City and later became the War Remnants Museum, as well as the American War Crimes Exhibition House, which opened in two locations, Ðà Nẵng city in 1975 and Sơn Mỹ village (the site of the 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre) in 1976. These exhibition houses were later closed in the 1990s when "relations with the United States began to improve and visual documentation of crimes was 'no longer needed'" (Schwenkel 163–64).

6. In this passage, the phrase "a man with no face" refers to Man, whose visage has been rendered almost unrecognizable due to the handiwork of a US-deployed napalm bomb, with "lips scorched away to reveal perfect teeth, eyes bulging from withered sockets, nostrils reduced to holes without a nose, the hairless, earless skull one massive keloid scar" (Nguyen 2015, 323). In losing his face, Man becomes a generic (hu)man, stripped of his former selfhood and thus, like the narrator, able to see beyond the confines of binary logic and to recognize the truth—or, perhaps more accurately, the lie—of identity politics.

WORKS CITED

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Carter, Jimmy. 1977. "The President's News Conference." The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/the-presidents-news-conference-116.
Chihaya, Sarah. 2018. "Slips and Slides." PMLA 133 (2): 364–70.
Darda, Joseph. 2017. "Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome Narrative: Human Rights, the Nayirah Testimony, and the Gulf War." American Quarterly 69 (1): 71–92.
———. 2019. "Like a Refugee: Veterans, Vietnam, and the Making of a False Equivalence." American Quarterly 71 (1): 83–104.
Espiritu, Yến Lê. 2014. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es). Oakland: University of California Press.
Goyal, Yogita. 2018. "Un-America: Refugees and the Vietnam War." PMLA 133 (2): 378–83.
Hong, Mai-Linh. 2016. "Reframing the Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives in the Post-9/11 Period." Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 41 (3): 18–41.
Hoy, Pat. 2015. "Spying with Sympathy and Love." Sewanee Review 123 (4): 685–90.
Kwon, Heonik. 2006. After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai. Oakland: University of California Press.
Masco, Joseph. 2014. The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Nguyen, Marguerite, and Catherine Fung. 2017. "On Writing, Radicalism, and Literary Value: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen." Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 42 (3): 201–21.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2015. The Sympathizer. New York: Grove Press.
———. 2016a. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2016b. "A Novel Intervention: Remembering the Vietnam War: A Conversation with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Viet Thanh Nguyen." World Policy Journal 33 (3): 65–71.
———. 2016c. "What is Vietnamese American Literature?" In Looking Back on the Vietnam War: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives, edited by Brenda M. Boyle and Jeehyun Lim, 50–63. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
———. 2018. "Dislocation is My Location." PMLA 133 (2): 428–36.
O'Nan, Stewart. 1998. "Introduction." In The Vietnam Reader: The Definitive Collection of American Fiction and Nonfiction on the War, edited by Stewart O'Nan, 1–6. New York: Anchor.
Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy. 2010. This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Rody, Caroline. 2018. "Between 'I' and 'We': Viet Thanh Nguyen's Interethnic Multitudes." PMLA 133 (2): 396–405.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schwenkel, Christina. 2009. The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Valverde, Caroline Kieu-Linh. 2012. Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Xiang, Sunny. 2018. "The Ethnic Author Represents the Body Count." PMLA 133 (2): 420–27.

Share