The stripping of the Sympathizer from the narrative voice was rather interesting, and I thought, at first, that he was being striped of his faces. The opposite seemed to happen though, as the narrative voice returned to him and he began referring to himself with pluralities. It seems like the stripping removed not the faces but the arbitrary boundaries the Sympathizer set up between them. This goes back to his fear of representation, and leads me to wonder whether he mis-represented himself previously or if he ended up losing his representative faculties in the end. The former would be supported by the return of the narrative voice, while the later would be supported, I think, simply because he was usually understood in the terms of others, with the relevance of his mixed cultural heritage being the prime example.
February 28, 2018 at 12:54 pm
It also really struck me when the narrative voice changed at the end of his “confession” when it was going in real time, and the pluralistic perspective almost made it feel like he was becoming a more omniscient narrator. Once he removes the “arbitrary boundaries” and isn’t trying to section off parts of his identity he gains a greater perspective