I was thinking about intertextuality from the first page, which called Invisible Man to my mind as soon as I read it, even before I went back and saw the dedication. That told me that the author wants the reader to keep an eye on those relationships within the text. As a subset of intertextuality, the references the narrator makes to various books, musicians, and other elements of American culture, particularly in the first chapter, seem to point to a connection between intertextuality and identity. The assumption that people make and that the narrator proves wrong is that the narrator’s ability to talk about the Rolling Stones, a performed type of enjoyment, and his admitted genuine personal enjoyment of The Temptations and other American music, translates to an American-sympathizing outlook. In a sense, the performed enjoyment is something the reader already expects to not mean what it appears, but it is harder for the reader to accept that genuine enjoyment also does not translate to an alliance with the system and country that produced the media. It does, however, “blur… the lines between us and them…” The narrator also begins to speak about performativity of enjoyment (regarding prostitutes) right after he mentions his tendency to sympathize. “Performers perform at least partially to forget their sadness,” he says. Real emotions while playing a role might appear to be an oxymoron but this suggests that there is another blurring between the real and the fake.

The Sympathizer is narrated by a man defined by his duality, he is half Vietnamese and half French by blood (never fully accepted by either communities); he is a spy, so necessarily lives two roles, working for both the Viet Cong and South Vietnam; he is a Vietnamese refugee living in an America that other-izes him. The narrator opens with the declaration “I am also a man of two minds… able to see any issue from both sides” (1). While his ultimate loyalty lies with the Viet Cong/ Communist forces, he very clearly sympathizes with the people who are supposed to be his enemies. A particularly poignant moment is on the night before the fall of Saigon “They were my enemies, and yet they were also brothers-in-arms” (17) and sang together at the precipice of change, looking into the shared past (“feeling on the past and turning our gaze from the future”). The narrator is constantly torn, feeling for his enemies, and has a complicated relationship with the external world. This is also seen in his friendship with Bon, who hates the Communists that the narrator stands with. Despite these deep political differences, which are significant in the context of war, the narrator feels genuine affection and brotherhood for Bon even while maintaining constant deception. For most of the beginning of the confession, the narrator seems to navigate/ cope well with his many contradictions. He speaks matter of factly about their friendship/ enemy relationship (15), able to separate the two. It seems there is the possibility of cohesion and contradiction in harmony, which is further seen in the larger Vietnam and the Vietnamese community of refugees in America. Although within Vietnam, the war has violently torn a nation apart, the narrator reveals a continued sense of unity: “no matter how divided, all saw themselves as patriots fighting for a country to which they belonged” (30). The Vietnamese refugees endeavor to keep alive a national identity (69-70) despite how the community is composed of many different and opposite peoples.

Yet it is important to remember how the external war has brought about serious and real destruction and separation. In the evacuation, the very community seen in desperation had regarded only themselves (and family) every man for himself. Back in Vietnam, the Vietnamese have/are  engaged in violent and tragic attacks against one another. That conflict cannot be without complications for the collective identity. (Cannot simply say that despite differences/ they are together/ one).

With his role in the murder of the major, the narrator also starts identifying the complications of duality/ opposition in a whole. The narrator attempts to dissociate himself from his role (he had told the General that the major was the spy), by claiming he was “trapped by circumstance” (89). Nevertheless, the narrator goes through some moral doubt, and references Hegel “tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, but I was right to kill him. Wasn’t I?” (102) The narrator had previously identified how both sides had good people, but until this point in his confession, he had not identified the severity of his dilemma (the Communist spy he failed was pure failure, not much of a conflict), and how his dual role forces him into very sticky moral positions.

Voice(s) in The Sympathizer

The first person narrative in the Sympathizer makes the narrator’s voice our main point of entry into the story, and the various characters involved. The way the narration handles free direct speech points to his voice as the filter through which we have access to his world, as he constantly blurs the line between narration, indirect and direct speech. From the beginning of the novel, and on multiple occasions, the narrator addresses the Commandant directly, making him the preferred interlocutor to his narration – it might serve as a way to recall some past events, and have another characters rhetorically check the truth in the narrator’s words, but it is also a way for him to play with the proximity/distance structure of every one of his relationships: on page 32, he is trying to either breach the distance or increase it through irony by having the Commandant agree to his rather treacherous thoughts (“It is always better to admire the best among our foes than the worst among our friends. Wouldn’t you agree, Commandant?”). The unconventional handling of free speech serves a similar purpose, where the task of the reader figuring out whose voice he is reading is made slightly more difficult by the absence of any typographic marker of free speech. This is in my opinion a way for the narrator to show that he can “see any issue from both sides” (1), and the blending of voices is made by his understanding the various persona the other characters take on, as he identify with their plight: “Like him, I, too, was a man trapped by difficult circumstances”.  One instance where we do see direct speech markers is on page 76,where the narrator professes his love to Sofia – a moment where there must not be any sort of identification, where romantic entanglement on the narrator’s part must reject the blending of their voices.

After Deckert finds out that Tyrell’s assistant is a replicant, Tyrell says that he programmed memories into her as a sort of “cushion” so her emotions are less raw and it makes them easier to control. Tyrell couldn’t program them to feel less instead he had to work around it by creating memories. Memories were the means to which he could control/manage the emotions of the replicant’s without taking away from the human capacities of their program. They were a design tactic to determine the character of the replicant’s, yet it seems as though his assistant replicant has a character of her own. The memories were programmed yet the way she relates to it feels very much like her own. The weird thing about the replicants is that Tyrell and his engineers programmed them, so you’d think they’d be the one in control, but the replicants are able to use their programming to act in ways in which the programming couldn’t account for. And maybe it is in their acting against the corporation that they are able to assert a character that they have created themselves rather than a character that has been designed for them.

In a narrative centered around what characters can or cannot do defining who they are and who they cannot be, the decision to have Deckard’s fingers immobilized in his final escape from Roy (although using physical disability as a steak-raiser in final battle is not unique to this movie) carries the additional implication of lack of physical expertise being linked to humanity. While the replicants’ heightened physical ability is one of their tell-tale signs of inhumanity, Deckard remains human in our eyes even with the open question (at this point in the film) of whether he is human partially because he displays weakness. However when Roy’s hand gives out in the same sequence, he responds to his own weakness with his “inhuman” fix of self harm, stabbing a nail through his flesh. Even though he gives the human reaction to this pain, his will and ability to even perform such an act on himself makes him suspect – even though that’s what heros like Deckard must display in the film for survival. We are trained to see strength and self mastery as heroic, but the rules of the Blade Runner break those down – if the character of the hero is our lens into the world of the film, and the hero is given that role by his perseverance and strength, how can we balance that with strength being a sign of lack of character at all?