The other blood brother is Bon, not a member of the cell and, later in life, a fiercely patriotic South Vietnamese soldier. However, he is already a Communist sympathizer, having joined a three-boy cell in high school, led by a boy named Man, one of the narrator’s three blood brothers. agents to be educated at Occidental College in Los Angeles and, later, to serve his spymasters as a liaison within the South Vietnamese Army, working as an aide to the General. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess.īorn in the northern section of Indochina in 1945, the narrator is recruited as a teenager by U.S. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds…I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Instead, the novel seems to about living in two worlds as the narrator suggests with these words that open the book: These are the metaphysical issues at the heart of The Sympathizer, the winner of the 2106 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but that’s not clear until the very end of the novel.

What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others? And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around up apparently do, in nothing? At the end of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer, the unnamed narrator and central character asks a series of questions:

The sympathizer author