a) The narrator's experience as a double agent definitely reveals his fluctuating outsider/ insider status. In the novel, the unnamed narrator (referred to as the Captain) is a South Vietnamese general's most trusted aide; he's also a North Vietnamese communist mole, and he has been assigned to spy on the general.

The narrator negotiates his double role with finesse, objectivity, and discretion. He exhibits compassion for both the North Vietnamese position and the South Vietnamese one. Even as he reports tidbits of information to his handler, Man, the Captain finds himself sympathizing with the South Vietnamese people. He realizes that no South Vietnamese citizen ever asked to be brutalized in his own country by his Northern cousins. In short order, he must also finalize transportation logistics for the general and a small group of patriots who wish to flee the country. The captain works with Claude, the general's CIA liaison in South Vietnam.

In the novel, we can see that the Captain must negotiate the complexities of his relationship with the South Vietnamese general, Claude, and Man with a certain amount of detachment. He relates how precarious his double life is: in order to keep from blowing his spy cover, he ends up condemning a fellow communist agent to an indefinite period of torture and incarceration. Later, he must assassinate a college acquaintance, Sonny, on the general's orders. In his position of duality, he cannot afford the privilege of grief or emotional catharsis. Even as he decides who the general's ninety-two fellow passengers will be on the flight out of South Vietnam, the Captain must ignore the dictates of his conscience and perform his task with detached precision.

In the story, the Captain is both an insider and an outsider. He has two "faces." As an outsider, he must repress his reservations about the war in order to function credibly in his role as a South Vietnamese/ American ally. Simultaneously, he must ignore his personal inclinations as a Vietnamese citizen in order to obey the dictates of his communist loyalties. He is both an insider and outsider in his own country. Of his two blood brothers, one is a communist (Man), while the other (Bon) is a patriot. He must protect Bon without arousing Man's suspicion about his motives. Both the Captain and Man resort to subterfuge to deceive Bon about their communist loyalties.

Later, the Captain is ordered by the general and his communist handlers to accept a consultant role on a movie project. Although he is faced with conflicting interests, the Captain remains focused on his ultimate goal. The movie is a Hollywood production about the Vietnam War, and the Captain hopes to influence how the filmmaker portrays the war. He is disappointed when he discovers that the filmmaker has little interest in telling the Vietnamese side of the story. When pressed, the filmmaker consents to three speaking parts for Vietnamese actors; sadly, he uses Filipino actors for those parts. For his part, the Captain is constrained by his need to keep his cover, so he has few options in terms of making substantive changes. Through this distressing experience, the author shows how the Captain must consistently vacillate between his insider and outsider status in order to retain his sanity and survive in mutually exclusive environments.

b) The narrator feels that he can make the claim because he has been on both sides of the equation. As both an insider and outsider, the narrator feels that he approaches the matter from a more objective vantage point. He sees Vietnamese history through the lens of impartiality, and sees the civil war in his country as a conflict between two opposing forces that often entertain ambivalent goals. These are the same forces that rage in every human soul, and as an immigrant, the narrator feels that he recognizes this on a more intrinsic level than the typical westerner.

Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, and to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies.

As for whether anthropologists agree with the narrator's claim, you might be interested to know what many anthropologists conclude about race. I suggests reading Newsweek's article "There Is No Such Thing As Race." The anthropologists conclude there "is no inherent relationship between intelligence, law-abidingness, or economic practices and race, just as there is no relationship between nose size, height, blood group, or skin color and any set of complex human behaviors." So, when the narrator asserts that non-white peoples know white people better than themselves, he is really reiterating the anthropologists' claim: we are more alike than we realize.