The Sympathizer

It is months after the narrator’s torture has finally ended, and he is still ruminating on the nature of “nothing.” “The answer,” the narrator says, “was so absurd that now, months later and in the temporary safety of the navigator’s house, I laugh even as I reread this scene of my enlightenment” (370). The narrator, still touched by madness, tells us that he finally got “the joke” of the Commissar’s question, to which “nothing” was the punch line. Basically, to understand why anyone goes to war is madness, so to understand the “nothing” in Man’s slogan, one must be somewhat mad: “A good student cannot understand nothing; only the class clown, the misunderstood idiot, the devious fool, and the perpetual joker can do that” (370). Put another way, the narrator realizes something unsettling about the cyclical nature of human nature, seeing how the Communists had gone from being oppressed to oppressors: “I understood, at last, how our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power. In this transformation, we were not unusual” (376).

The narrator, we learn, directly after the torture had been rendered a “grinning simpleton huddled in the corner,” and doctors feared he would never speak again (371). After months more of rehabilitation, studying his confession, and learning to speak again, the narrator and Bon are released.

In another narrative shift, the first-person perspective of the narrator changes from the singular “I” to the plural “we,” signaling that the narrator’s metaphorically divided mind has become a literally divided mind after his torture: “I was the man of two minds, me and myself. We had been through so much, me and myself. Everyone we met had wanted to drive us apart from each other, wanted us to choose either one thing or another, except the Commissar” (376). Bon and the narrator end up fleeing Vietnam, but they do not return to America—instead, they join the boat people, the group of Vietnamese refugees with no final destination.