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The Sympathizer

175 statements
33 feature instances
6 referencing feature instances

The Sympathizer	type	TVTItem
The Sympathizer	label	The Sympathizer
The Sympathizer	page	TheSympathizer
The Sympathizer	comment	The Sympathizer is a 2015 novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen.The story opens with the unnamed narrator, an aide-de-camp to a similarly unnamed General in the army of South Vietnam. In 1975, as South Vietnam is collapsing, the narrator manages to get the General on a flight out of the country. Also getting out of the country is Bon, the narrator's best friend and an anti-communist zealot. The three of them eventually make it to America and attempt to start new lives in exile.What neither Bon nor the General know is that the narrator is a deep-cover Communist spy for the North Vietnamese. His other best friend, his handler Man, prevails on him to continue his mission in the United States, spying on the South Vietnamese exile community on behalf of the government of now-united Vietnam. It turns out to be a wise precaution, as the General, unable to adjust to his diminished status in America—he owns a liquor store—elects to assemble an army of volunteers and invade Vietnam.The novel was later adapted into a mini-series co-developed and directed by Park Chan-wook for A24, which was released by HBO on April 14, 2024.
The Sympathizer	fetched	2024-04-17T12:31:22Z
The Sympathizer	parsed	2024-04-17T12:31:22Z
The Sympathizer	processingComment	Dropped link to VerbalIrony: Not a Feature - UNKNOWN
The Sympathizer	processingUnknown	VerbalIrony
The Sympathizer	isPartOf	DBTropes
The Sympathizer / int_1282bf4f	type	No Celebrities Were Harmed
The Sympathizer / int_1282bf4f	comment	No Celebrities Were Harmed: The narrator meets a film director known only as "The Auteur" who is a very thinly veiled version of Francis Ford Coppola working on an unnamed project that is suspiciously like Apocalypse Now. (Word of God in the acknowledgments makes this explicit, mentioning several references regarding the production of Apocalypse Now.)
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The Sympathizer / int_1869b4b1	type	Unreliable Narrator
The Sympathizer / int_1869b4b1	comment	Unreliable Narrator: Guess who. Several key scenes set at the camp center around filling in the gaps in his account of the Communist agent whose capture he witnessed, and his relationship with his father. After his mental break under interrogation (or perhaps, merely a breakthrough), practically everything he says and observes is open to question.
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The Sympathizer / int_1e1afc1b	type	Framing Device
The Sympathizer / int_1e1afc1b	comment	Framing Device: Approximately 4/5 of the novel is the narrator in a prison cell, delivering his confession to a person he addresses as "Commandant". Chapter 19 finally catches the story up with the "present" and finds the narrator talking to the commandant, his confession being finished.
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The Sympathizer / int_2eb94abd	type	Deadly Euphemism
The Sympathizer / int_2eb94abd	comment	Deadly Euphemism: How the General communicates that each supposed Communist agent needs to be killed.
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The Sympathizer / int_420dd6e6	type	Sleep Deprivation Punishment
The Sympathizer / int_420dd6e6	comment	Sleep Deprivation Punishment: The protagonist is held in a torture chamber where one of the punishments is having incredibly bright lights shone on him at all times, alternated with random moments of absolute darkness. This disrupts his sleep and causes him to slowly lose his grip on sanity, all in an attempt to get him to confess.
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The Sympathizer / int_4d45aa06	type	Banana Republic
The Sympathizer / int_4d45aa06	comment	Banana Republic: The narrator, a Communist spy who thinks very little of the South Vietnamese government, refers to South Vietnam as a "jackfruit republic."
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The Sympathizer / int_4ef62a4d	type	Full-Circle Revolution
The Sympathizer / int_4ef62a4d	comment	Full-Circle Revolution:
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The Sympathizer / int_50b1855d	type	Spy Fiction
The Sympathizer / int_50b1855d	comment	Spy Fiction: Stale Beer indeed, with the narrator living the distinctly unglamorous life of a refugee while sending reports back to Hanoi.
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The Sympathizer / int_6159beb1	type	It Tastes Like Feet
The Sympathizer / int_6159beb1	comment	It Tastes Like Feet: The narrator complains that the cheap American beer he drinks both looks and tastes like baby's pee.
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The Sympathizer / int_64713b04	type	Pedophile Priest
The Sympathizer / int_64713b04	comment	Pedophile Priest: The narrator's father, who impregnated his mother when she was thirteen.
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The Sympathizer / int_77063cd7	type	Hooker with a Heart of Gold
The Sympathizer / int_77063cd7	comment	Hooker with a Heart of Gold: The narrator rejects this trope utterly.
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The Sympathizer / int_7a265daa	type	Eagleland
The Sympathizer / int_7a265daa	comment	Eagleland: Flavor 2, as while the narrator may have mixed feelings about his countrymen on either side of the war, he definitely hates the hell out of America, Americans, and white people.
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The Sympathizer / int_7b3ebb57	type	Buxom Beauty Standard
The Sympathizer / int_7b3ebb57	comment	Buxom Beauty Standard: The narrator goes on at length about the general's buxom daughter Lana, describing her body shaped like a figure-8 and her deep cleavage.
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The Sympathizer / int_7eebe99c	type	The Alcoholic
The Sympathizer / int_7eebe99c	comment	The Alcoholic: It becomes clear that the narrator is this when he is wracked with the DTs while his sad little group is sneaking through Laos.
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The Sympathizer / int_8ed5c6e4	type	Asshole Victim
The Sympathizer / int_8ed5c6e4	comment	Asshole Victim: The "crapulent major," whom the narrator throws under the bus once the General starts to suspect Communist agents have come to America among the refugees. As it turns out, the major was involved with the capture, torture, and gang-rape of a real agent back in Vietnam; the narrator's own complicity in this case forms an important part of the book's climax, suggesting that he sacrificed the major to assuage his own guilt.
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The Sympathizer / int_a42f56b0	type	Royal "We"
The Sympathizer / int_a42f56b0	comment	Royal "We": A variant. After the year of Cold-Blooded Torture leaves the narrator a broken man, he starts thinking of himself as "a man of two minds." Afterwards he refers to himself with the first person plural, as "we".
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The Sympathizer / int_b5049d76	type	Added Alliterative Appeal
The Sympathizer / int_b5049d76	comment	Added Alliterative Appeal: The narrator resorts to this when ruminating on his love/hate relationship with the United States.
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The Sympathizer / int_b7e0c5ff	type	Love Triangle
The Sympathizer / int_b7e0c5ff	comment	Love Triangle: Between the narrator, Sonny, and Ms. Mori. It adds further complications to the General's ordering of Sonny's death.
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The Sympathizer / int_bdc453a0	type	Incest Subtext
The Sympathizer / int_bdc453a0	comment	Incest Subtext: The narrator's recollections of his mother are closely intertwined with his growing awareness of sexuality (although his outward relationship with her is innocent), while he openly hates his father and accidentally-on-purpose has Man kill him.
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The Sympathizer / int_c59d9a4b	type	Half-Breed Discrimination
The Sympathizer / int_c59d9a4b	comment	Half-Breed Discrimination: The narrator is the illegitimate offspring of a French priest and a Vietnamese mother. As a consequence no one likes him or trusts him.
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The Sympathizer / int_ca87e3ec	type	No Name Given
The Sympathizer / int_ca87e3ec	comment	No Name Given: Neither the narrator nor the General that he worked for in Saigon. Also true of several other lesser characters in the story, including the "crapulent Major" that the narrator throws suspicion on, the General's wife, called only "Madame", the Commandant addressed in the framing device, the right-wing gung-ho Congressman that aligns himself with the South Vietnamese community, and the film director (see No Celebrities Were Harmed above).
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The Sympathizer / int_d0c13631	type	Mrs. Robinson
The Sympathizer / int_d0c13631	comment	Mrs. Robinson: Mrs. Mori, the 46-year-old Japanese-American woman who seduces the narrator not long after he comes to the USA.
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The Sympathizer / int_d2b18a18	type	Holiday in Cambodia
The Sympathizer / int_d2b18a18	comment	Holiday in Cambodia: In this case, Vietnam, at the tail-end of the war.
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The Sympathizer / int_db2727e0	type	The Book Cipher
The Sympathizer / int_db2727e0	comment	The Book Cipher: How the narrator communicates with Man after arriving in America, via messages written in invisible ink.
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The Sympathizer / int_de89c0a1	type	Dating What Daddy Hates
The Sympathizer / int_de89c0a1	comment	Dating What Daddy Hates: Lana takes a shine to the narrator when they reunite in America. Before he sets out for Thailand, the General pulls him aside and spells out that he knows they've been involved, and he has to send the narrator off to die because his daughter cannot be allowed to be with a half-French bastard.
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The Sympathizer / int_e5dfe115	type	Sworn Brothers
The Sympathizer / int_e5dfe115	comment	Sworn Brothers: Man, Bon, and the narrator were this since childhood, when they did the whole palm-slicing ritual.
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The Sympathizer / int_e67ff203	type	Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder
The Sympathizer / int_e67ff203	comment	Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Sofia Mori takes up with Sonny while the narrator is in the Philippines, working on The Movie. The narrator admits that he didn't write to her.
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The Sympathizer / int_e70127	type	The Mole
The Sympathizer / int_e70127	comment	The Mole: The narrator is an officer in South Vietnamese military intelligence, and a longtime spy for the North.
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The Sympathizer / int_ea2e9f2d	type	No Ending
The Sympathizer / int_ea2e9f2d	comment	No Ending: Ends pretty much in medias res, with the narrator and Bon getting ready to board a boat which will smuggle them out of Saigon and back to the West, with maybe a 50% chance of survival. It turns out he does survive, as 2021 sequel novel The Committed has him in Paris, engaging in drugs and crime.
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The Sympathizer / int_ea35fda5	type	Bastard Bastard
The Sympathizer / int_ea35fda5	comment	Bastard Bastard: The narrator, although sympathetic, is not a good person. He has his moments, though.
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The Sympathizer / int_ea7e3be8	type	Dramatic Gun Cock
The Sympathizer / int_ea7e3be8	comment	Dramatic Gun Cock: "I heard the click-clack all around me of weapons being primed for firing, and I did the same."
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The Sympathizer / int_f9c17447	type	The Remnant
The Sympathizer / int_f9c17447	comment	The Remnant: The General and all the other anti-Communist refugees who imagine that they'll organize a resistance to the Hanoi government. The narrator eventually meets a more legitimate Remnant in the form of the admiral, who has been hiding out in the jungle since the fall of Saigon. He says that he sailed his ship to Thailand instead of following the Americans, and swore a vow to continue the struggle.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

The Sympathizer	hasFeature	Asian-American Media / int_88770526
The Sympathizer	hasFeature	Banana Republic / int_88770526
The Sympathizer	hasFeature	Full-Circle Revolution / int_88770526
The Sympathizer	hasFeature	Sleep Deprivation Punishment / int_88770526
The Sympathizer	hasFeature	The Book Cipher / int_88770526
The Sympathizer	hasFeature	Trapped Undercover / int_88770526

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