The Sympathizer

The narrative structure of the book does not follow an exact linear timeline. While the confession does plod forward with some regularity, the narrator frequently skips backward in time via flashbacks, which can go back decades into childhood or just a few days backward into what happened last week. What is more, the narrator has a conscience-induced amnesia, under which he buries painful memories.

Time, then, moves in an erratic fashion around human, emotional pain. For instance, when the narrator is confined to a hospital bed and is forced to ruminate on his torture of a Communist man referred to (fittingly) as the Watchman, the narrator realizes that: “Time had stopped for the Watchman. What I did not realize until I woke up in my own white room was that time had stopped for me, too…I was not a bastard, I was not a bastard, I was not I was not, I was not, unless, somehow, I was” (193). The narrator’s thinking about the Watchman spirals into his own negative feelings about being a bastard, which stem from his childhood. Instead of moving forward, he is trapped in an endless loop of “I was not a bastard.”

 The narrator also refers to refugees as “time travelers”: “Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers…The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles” (199). The narrator sees history as doomed to repeat itself, and he ruminates on the cyclical, doomed nature of time in the concluding chapters of the book. After the narrator becomes fully unhinged post-torture, he feels that he lives completely out of time: “Time no longer ran straight as a railroad; time no longer rotated on a dial; time no longer crawled under my back; time was infinitely looping, a cassette tape repeating without end; time howled in my ear, screaming with laughter at the idea that we could control it with wristwatches, alarm clocks, revolutions, history. We were, all of us, running out of time, except for the malevolent baby. The baby who was screaming had all the time in the world and the irony was that the baby did not even know it” (367). When one looks beyond human history, one sees the root cause of human suffering—that “malevolent baby,” which represents a kind of primal, original pain. 

War is not portrayed as a noble, heroic affair in The Sympathizer. Instead, war is represented in a tragicomic light, which supports another, larger statement about war made in the book, namely, that it is absurd.

“Tragicomic,” indeed, does not necessarily mean that every tragedy in the book is rendered with humor. There are passages in the book where we see the traumas of war intertwining with childhood traumas. For example, in this scene when the narrator is forced to carry the amputated leg of his dead friend, the narrator is reminded of a traumatic experience from his youth involving his father: “I carried his leg as far away from me as possible, its weight growing more and more, like the Bible my father made me hold in front of the classroom as punishment for some transgression, my arm outstretched with the book on the scale of my hand. I carried that memory still, along with the memory of my father in his coffin, corpse as white as the affectless lieutenant’s protruding bone” (302). His grappling with religion is enmeshed with the burdens of war. Still, “tragicomic” is the most apt way to understand the “joke” at the end of the book, which is so absurd it leaves the narrator dumb with laughter. “Now that we are powerful,” the Commissar says, “we don’t need the French or the Americans to fuck us over. We can fuck ourselves just fine” (364). Sub-themes surrounding war also include a strong anti-colonialism and American culture as a corrupting force.