Nguyen‘s Ghosts in The Sympathizer: Collapsing Binaries and Signalling Just Memory

Abstract

Abstract In “Remembering War, Dreaming Peace”, Viet Thanh Nguyen describes popular American stories about the Vietnam War as “melodramas of traumatized white manhood” (Japanese Journal of American Studies 20 [2009]: 152). These limit the compassion available for non-American characters by way of compulsory empathy for the figure of the beleaguered American soldier. He argues that greater cosmopolitanism in American literature about the conflict would redress this by eliciting empathy for these ignored others. Nguyen furthers this argument in Nothing Ever Dies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016) by claiming that stories about the war tend to stereotype these forgotten others as victims, villains, or revolutionary heroes. Consequently, non-American characters are never granted the degree of subjectivity reserved for those Western characters who hate or sympathise with them. In this article, I utilise Derrida‘s concepts of the spectre and hauntology to contend that Nguyen limns ghosts in The Sympathizer (London: Corsair, 2015) to embody the Vietnamese narrator‘s capacity to perform inhumane actions, thereby elevating him to full subjectivity. I argue that the indeterminacies associated with spectres allow Nguyen to trouble the simple binaries between aggressor and victim. Furthermore, by deploying these indeterminacies strategically, Nguyen uses The Sympathizer to explore the possibilities of just memory in contexts that change due to the migration of those subjects who perform commemorative acts.