Viet Thanh Nguyen’s acclaimed literary novel, which delves into themes of subjectivity, empathy, and solidarity, is particularly relevant to this moment, reasons Ann Gelder, who reads the book alongside On Freedom
Dustin Snipes
Istarted rereading Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer the day after the 2024 election, and my plans for this essay immediately disintegrated. I had been considering the novel’s reinventions of craft and genre, which offered rich possibilities for interpretation, though at a comfortable critical distance. Then the election happened and distance vanished. Every page of The Sympathizer now felt as urgent as a punch. It also felt surprisingly hopeful.
Reading the novel alongside On Freedom, by Timothy Snyder, a historian of totalitarianism, helped reveal the engine of that hope: the complicated, deeply human act of sympathizing. It’s important that sympathizing is an action, which makes one who does it a sympathizer—an agent in both senses of the word. As the novel clarifies, to sympathize is to claim and create freedom, even in the direst circumstances.
The Sympathizer takes the form of a confession, written by an unnamed narrator being held in a Vietnamese prison camp. A captain in the South Vietnamese military police, the narrator also spied for the Communists during the war in Vietnam and afterward as part of an evacuee community in Los Angeles. In official parlance, this made the captain a “sympathizer,” a danger to “freedom,” as the U.S. government defined it. However, early in the novel, the captain suggests the true subversive power of this identity.
You have asked me what I mean when I say “we” or “us,” as in those moments when I identify with the southern soldiers and evacuees on whom I was sent to spy. Should I not refer to those people, my enemies, as “them”? I confess that after having spent almost my whole life in their company I cannot help but sympathize with them, as I do with many others.
The self-described “bastard” child of a Vietnamese maid and a French priest, the captain exists because of a historically fraught relationship that he cannot call consensual. Yet, he explains, his mother told him that “blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior.” She expressed her own agency by refusing to perpetuate the harm she experienced. Instead, she taught her son to sympathize, to see the world from others’ perspectives.
This doesn’t always work out well. The captain perpetrates or fails to stop heinous acts, which then haunt him. Sympathizing also nearly gets him killed: We later learn he’s in prison because he returned to Vietnam with a small army that tried to overthrow the Communist government. He did so not because his own beliefs had changed but to protect Bon, his best friend from lycée and a true believer in the South’s cause. Yet radical sympathizing eventually leads to the captain’s freedom.
Snyder defines freedom not as a negative condition—the removal of perceived barriers—but as a positive value that requires sustained action. One key to positive freedom is empathy. Snyder suggests that the bodies of other people allow us to empathize with them as subjects facing the same predicaments we do and that they also give us knowledge about ourselves and the world: “We have to see the bodies of others as subjects, because otherwise we cannot see ourselves as subjects. And if we fail to do that, we cannot be free.”
Though the captain calls it sympathizing, he practices this empowering empathy in the prison camp. He is tortured nearly to death by the commissar, who turns out to be his handler, Man, his other best friend from lycée. Man’s face has been burned off in a napalm attack. “Can you imagine my wife and children seeing this?” Man asks. “Can you imagine their horror? Can you imagine mine every time I look in the mirror?” The captain can imagine and weeps for his friend and torturer. Man cries, too: “I’m crying because I can hardly bear to see you so afflicted. But I cannot save you except to have you afflicted. The commandant would not have it otherwise.” Throughout this horrific episode, by sympathizing with each other’s pain, Man and the captain both claim their subjectivity, their still-resilient humanity. Man then fulfills his vow to save the captain and Bon, arranging (though through morally ambiguous means) for their release and escape.
Corroborating, it seems, Snyder’s concept of empathy, the captain later says:
We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same. Likewise, we often deceived ourselves when we thought we saw ourselves most clearly.
In the aftermath of his torture, the captain comes to regard himself as more than a lone individual. The narrative voice shifts from “I” to “we,” not only at “moments” of sympathy, as the captain deployed it at the book’s beginning, but permanently. Later, he, or they, embark on a perilous voyage along with other so-called boat people, and his “we” intersects with the “we” of other refugees. The intersection may not last: The captain suspects they (or he?) might turn their “backs on the unwanted” after reaching safety. This is not a redemption story, for redemption, like permanence, is impossible. But the captain has realized something else:
No, we cannot be alone! Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes, and forbidden plots. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.
Similarly, Snyder writes, “No individual achieves freedom alone. Practically and ethically, freedom for you means freedom for me. This recognition is solidarity, the final form of freedom.”
By novel’s end, the captain is no longer a solitary “bastard,” a double agent who feels at home nowhere. By insisting on sympathizing, even with his life at stake, he has found his place, his people, and his agency, at least for now, on the sea. In his final words:
We swear to keep, on penalty of death, this one promise:
We will live!
In these darkening times, let us all strive to be sympathizers: imaginative, hopeful, defiant, just, and free.•
