The Sympathizer Viet Thanh Nguyen Analysis

In 2013 when Viet Thanh Nguyen began to write The Sympathizer, it had been 40 years since the Vietnam War. It had been 40 years since French and American military involvement ravaged a once beautiful countryside and littered lush forests with napalm. It had been 40 years since 2 million people were displaced from their country and left to die in the Pacific Ocean. In those 40 years, many works were published about the Vietnam War. These stories came from many, contrasting, perspectives. Young or old, male or female, the war was told differently by every person who was involved in the battle, no matter how small their role. Despite the cacophony of standpoints vying to tell the definitive tale of what happened in Vietnam, the perspective of

Much like the Narrator, his parents were born in North Vietnam and immigrated to the south in 1958. This was because catholic priests convinced them that the Viet Cong would commit atrocities when they took over. When the communist reach spread to the south, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s mother fled alongside him and his brother, leaving his father and sister behind in Saigon. This was unintentional, as the author describes; “My mother can’t communicate with my father, so she takes our lives into her hands and decides to flee the town on foot”. Luckily, his father had the same idea and through happenstance, they ended up leaving on the same barge. Though he didn 't suffer the same trauma as the Narrator on pages 48-50, when an errant gunman kills his godson and best friends wife, Viet experienced much misery during his journey. In an interview with Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air, he remembers guards aboard his ship shooting smaller rafts for fear of them being Viet Cong. Upon further research into this event, Viet found that most of these boats were homemade rafts which housed the poor of

The plight of the Vietnamese immigrant in America was a necessary one to tell. It is a story which Viet Thanh Nguyen has lived his entire life, all that he needed was a catalyst to write it. One came in 2011, when, as a part of the Arab Spring, Syrian rebels attempted to overthrow the Assad regime. Their attempt lead to a bloody conflict, which still rages to this day, as well as the displacement of over 11 million people, as of the most recent statistics. While it may not have been the worldwide migrant crisis it is today, by 2013 enough people were forced out of Syria that the world took notice. It also caused many to draw parallels to the migrant crisis which the Vietnamese faced 40 years prior. Among these people was Viet Thanh Nguyen, who was given a secondary reason to write his novel, to prevent what happened to the Vietnamese from happening to Syrians. His primary reason would forever be to give these lost migrants a voice. An important issue remained, however, how could this novel capture the attention of a mainstream audience. The previous year, spy film Skyfall earned 1 billion dollars at the box office. A fan of the genre all his life, Viet Thanh Nguyen understood that if so much of the public was willing to watch a spy movie that same public would read a spy book. One spy, in particular, would make a good protagonist. In his interview with NPR radio, Viet Thanh Nguyen revealed his inspiration was; “a very famous spy named Pham Xuan An who was so important that