Book Club Guide

The Sympathizer

by Viet Thanh Nguyen · 2015 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Double consciousness and the man who belongs to every side and none
Colonialism and the culture industry that perpetuates it
Confession as form — and the reader who stands behind the commandant

About this book

A communist spy serves as a captain in the South Vietnamese army and escapes to America after the fall of Saigon, all while writing a confession to an unnamed commandant. Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut is a dazzling, angry novel about colonialism, complicity and the double consciousness of the man who belongs to every side and none.

Published in 2015, The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered one of the most important American novels of recent years. Nguyen was born in Vietnam and came to the US as a refugee at age four.

Discussion questions

The narrator is an unnamed communist spy serving in the South Vietnamese army. How does Nguyen use this double identity to examine complicity — and does the novel allow the narrator any fixed moral position?
The Sympathizer is partly a critique of Hollywood's treatment of the Vietnam War — the narrator consults on an obviously Apocalypse Now-like film. What is Nguyen saying about who gets to tell the story of a war?
The confession structure places the reader in the position of the commandant. How does this structural choice implicate the reader — and what does it ask us to acknowledge?
The novel's ending raises fundamental questions about what the narrator has confessed to and whether his confession means anything. How do you interpret it?
Nguyen has said he wanted to write the Vietnam War from the other side — the side usually silenced or reduced to background. What does the novel offer that American Vietnam War fiction cannot?