Narrator
The protagonist of the novel is the unnamed first-person narrator who was the title character in the book preceding this novel titled The Sympathizer. He is a Vietnamese refugee forced to flee the country after the fall of Saigon in the wake of American troops being withdrawn from fighting the long war there. The book opens with a flashback to his experience as one of the “boat people” fleeing the country in the wake of the takeover by the communists.
Although an avowed communist, he was forced into self-exile despite the communist takeover South Vietnam due to internal political upheaval in the Party. He winds up in France finding himself a revolutionary without a revolution to fight and having doubts about his communism within the limitations of the party ideology. Eventually, he is exposed to capitalist ideology through the lens of organized crime when he gets involved in the underworld of drug trafficking.
The story of the narrator shifts back and forth in an uncertain dialectic between his passion for political discourse and debate with like-minded intellectuals and his need for money to live on in which he is surrounded by gangsters and low-life types with unexpectedly colorful nicknames like Mona Lisa, Beatles and two goons known as Ugly and Uglier. At the same time, he must be constantly vigilant against his blood brother discovering the secret that would destroy him.
Bon
The narrator describes Bon as his blood brother and is his closest companion. Despite this close bond, however, even Bon was not taken into the narrator’s confidence that he was a dedicated communist. In fact, Bon was himself dedicated to the anticommunist cause which the narrator was secretly working as a spy to subvert. Much of the conflict in the novel stems from the narrator’s continuing effort to keep Bon from discovering his secret.
Bon received the same type of lycée education in Vietnam as the narrator, but harbors a deep and savage hatred for the French. The only reason that he is in the country is to be close to his blood brother. Bon is situated as almost the complete opposite to the narrator in every way. Where the narrator is a voracious reader of political texts, Bon is more along the lines of a book-a-year type. Where the narrator is talkative, Bon is mostly silent. Most importantly, of course, is there conflicting views on communism, but on the narrator is aware of this opposition divergence. Bon is a and a man whom the narrator describes as having killed more communists than anyone he knows.
The intense—almost violent—reaction of Bon upon meeting the narrator’s “Aunt” is key. This “Aunt” is not actually a relative, but an influential French-Vietnamese intellectual who holds dinner parties at which sophisticated debates about political ideology are part of the menu. Upon meeting her, Bon levels the accusation that she is a communist who hangs a picture of the devil in her home. The devil in the photograph is actually the communist leader of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, and her response is that she is merely a fellow travel with certain communist sympathies. The intensity of Bon’s reaction is clearly intended as foreshadowing suggesting that the narrator’s secrets about his own communist sympathies cannot be maintained for much longer. And, indeed, this inevitable moment of revelation is an explosion that sends the narrative tumbling into completely different direction.
The Boss
The Boss is a Chinese gangster running a criminal enterprise built upon trafficking drugs and enforcing a protection racket. The narrator is enticed in the organization to push a drug derived from coffee beans he terms a “remedy.” It is the narrator’s entry into the highly capitalistic world of organized crime that forms the basis for much of the internal conflict within the narrator.
The Boss is also a kind of mirror of the narrator in that nobody knows his real name and he has been forced by circumstances to invent an identity for himself. In addition, the Boss also mirrors the narrator in that he has an established relationship with Bon. The Boss owes his life to the intervention of Bon and it is the promise he made to take care of him if he ever made it from Vietnam to France that brings the narrator into the criminal underworld.
Although very much an actively realistic character in the crime thriller aspect of the narrative that plays out, the Boss is also symbolically linked to the political discourse side of the story. Thematically, he is a metaphor for capitalist leaders. The narrator muses that there is just one thing separating the Boss’ status as a drug dealer and pimp from presidents and diplomats: time. Given enough time the Boss would have no problem making the transition from gangster to pillar of society within a democratic-capitalist system.
