A man of two kinds Anonymous College

The Sympathizer, the name of the novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, successfully depicted the main character in the book-- the “narrator” himself. The storytelling was in a quite vulgar yet concise style, which best describes the life of “a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces” (1). After the fall of Saigon, he continued his life of espionage on a general from South Vietnam, and The Sympathizer was kept as a part of his “confession” consist of his reflection to his guilt and the war itself. By depicting the experience the narrator had been looked down upon in Vietnam and America, and the tremendous conflict between the South Vietnam people believing in U.S. and the North Vietnamese believing in communism, Nguyen developed the duality of the narrator in his own identification and political consciousness in many aspects of his life, as he was neither a Vietnamese nor an American, while neither a communist nor a capitalist, all of which was due to the narrator’s personal experiences during the months and years of political turmoil and social unrest in Vietnam, which caused so much feeling of loss, grief, and guilt to the Vietnamese.

“Natural child” (21), this was how the narrator revealed about his identification, who would not be...