The indivisibility of the internal monologue from the external dialogue throughout The Sympathizer, and the relationship of that stylistic choice to the genre of the (then judged inadequate) confession, appears to highlight how strongly focalized to an individual the experience of being a character can be. A quotation mark implies exactitude, perfect recall of both oneself’s and another’s words. Their lack functions as a hint to the later outright acknowledgment that “Yes, memory was sticky” and the entire concept of memory’s fallibility. In a way, it depicts words and internal monologue as an individual often experiences them in retrospect—all in a jumble, not neatly recorded and written out by who said them. The narrator’s “resistance” or his inability to grasp at first that his confessional could be judged as not confessional enough reflects that jumble, in which an individual’s assessment of what is important in a personal narrative does not conform to any objective measure. The confession is not an archival record, because neither, of course, is memory. Nor is an individual character’s collection of traits, attitudes, etc. I think that the consequence of this mixture of intensely focalized but subjective memory is that strong individual focalization does not translate to an accurate view of the self, let alone of other characters. Experience of the self, sadly enough, does not lead to self-knowledge.

In the ending three chapters of The Sympathizer, the narrator undergoes a dynamic evolution in his self. In Chapter 21, he is in the initial stages of a split. It is indicated to the reader by the narrator’s first person narration disappearing and third person self referral takes its place (uses  third person “he” and calls himself “the prisoner”, “the pupil”. There is a brief return to first person language during his confession of doing nothing during the rape of the Communist agent by the policemen. (it seems that through confession/ memory, he regains his identity). However, there is still the sense that the narrator is “within” himself when contrasted with the narrator of Chapter 22. The narrator in Chapter 22 is further split into a complete separation: “I was divided, tormented body below, placid consciousness floating high above” (355). Throughout the chapter, the narrator watches the interrogation of himself. It is important that while he observes himself, he still identifies the interrogated/tortured as himself (“I saw myself admit it then” (356), yet there is a definite separation as done through the dialogue formatted like a movie script to be read. Finally at the end of Chapter 22, through psychological torture the narrator is reborn through his reeducation (pg 367), and we see that frenzied recount of sensations until the answer of “nothing” is forced out of him. In Chapter 23, the narrator goes through the process of “I glued myself back together” (369), where a residual split continues in pg 376, when the narrator refers to himself as plural “we”, “our” which ultimately extends to include others fleeing the country: there is the combining of consciousness, but is he subsumed into the collective or is he attempting to subsume the collective into himself?

The point of this splitting and merging and doubleness in one is first indicated by the doctor in Chapter 21: “he can observe himself as someone else…. For we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves… if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can” (342). The doctor suggests that the closest a self could be understood is for that self to do it themselves, that is a split is required. This is precisely what the narrator undergoes in Chapter 22. Through confession, a sort of split of self by style, he regains his identity briefly in Ch. 22. However, though he glues himself together eventually, there is the enduring sense of split/ divide within. Earlier, the narrator had acknowledged he was of two minds, he had stated it was a disadvantage in the beginning of his first written confession (written before his final reeducation). However, now he sees a division in self as reality that may be so for most, that “the true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole” (374). It seems in the end he has embraced the division which he has chosen but was also born with (361) and how it is impossible to choose between selves (“it was truly impossible, for how could I choose me against myself”). Through the process of splitting, he reclaims or claims  his identity (depending on whether you think he had it before) and accepts his life and reconciles his selves.

Ellison’s Invisible Man Connection

The scene in Chapter 21 is evocative of the scene in Ellison’s Invisible Man when the invisible man/ narrator wakes up in the hospital. In both scenes, the narrator undergoes a rebuilding of the self and it is prompted through  questions like “Who are you?” “What is your name?”. The answer of the question “What are you?” is more important than “Who are you?” in both instances. In Invisible Man, the doctors do not see the Invisible Man as a person, they see only a racial stereotype, a “what”. Here in the Sympathizer, it is more important to the Commandant if the narrator is a Communist. The who is not of concern to the others, but to both narrators, they are trying to find their who. Only through a split was the who (identity) found.

When The Sympathizer breaks from the memoir form in Chapter 19, it opens by framing the Commandant, to whom the “confession” has been addressed, as an editor, “Like Stalin, the commandant was a diligent editor, always ready to note my many errata and digressions and always urging me to delete, excise, reword, or add” (309). This dry comment makes it plain that the commandant (a literal authority) has authority over the text we have been reading this whole time and it retroactively frames the “confession” as more of a memoir. This also begins the shift towards his confinement and torture in order to produce a true confession, one that fits Foucault’s definition from Discipline and Punish, “Through the confession, the accused himself took part in the ritual of producing penal truth” (38).  While the rupture in narratological structure and the ambiguity of truth it produces are not necessarily unique to The Sympathizer, the novel manages to problematize both the memoir and the confession as reliable vessels of truth. When the nature of one’s character is on trial, the novel suggests,  form is more important than function.

Ultimately, the narrator returns to himself following his successful confession and relates the experience of recovering himself through his manuscript. Yet that process represents another attempt to edit the manuscript and add to it, further distorting or at least concealing the truth value of chapters 1-18. No novel is ever perfectly clear about what is true, but The Sympathizer deserves a lot of credit for forcing its reader to confront and reexamine the problems of authority and the cultural, ideological, and narrative valences that shape what is true, what a character consists of, and their particularities.