The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nyugen's Pulitzer Prize–winning 2015 novel, tells the story of a man working as a spy during and after the Vietnam War.

The narrative opens with the Fall of Saigon. The narrator—conspicuously unnamed—is embedded undercover in the Southern Vietnamese forces as the aide-de-camp to a man known only as "the General." This position is ideal—the narrator is, secretly, a spy for the North. His rank as a captain affords him ready access to Southern intelligence, which he covertly transmits to Man, his handler and childhood friend.

The majority of the book is structured as a written confession, told from his first-person perspective and addressed to a nameless superior he calls "the commandant." This has a framing effect in the traditional sense, in that the past-tense narration assures the reader that the narrator survives the ordeals to come, but it also creates a sense of foreboding. For the narrator to be writing a confession to a commandant, he must have been captured. Sure enough, the reader soon learns that he has: he's in a reeducation camp run by the very communist regime he's been secretly spying for.

Despite the conditions of his manuscript's creation, the narrator's tone throughout the text is genial, wry, and playful. His brutally honest, candid confession is peppered with jokes, witticisms, and long-winded discursive tangents on everything from communist philosophy to women to soup.

Nyugen's use of this inviting linguistic style is, to some degree, a trick played on the reader. The narrator is a man of deeply complicated moral standing, but the reader can't help but like him. In one of the book's later chapters, it transpires that all the personality and charm infused into the text make the confession inadmissible. The narrator's tone is too individualistic, which is seen by the commandant as an inherently Western and capitalistic flaw.

During this rejection, it's revealed that the prior pages are just one of many drafts, suggesting to the reader that the narrator may be unreliable. It's at this moment—when the commandant and the narrator begin to debate the confession's legitimacy in the present tense—that the book's structure begins to shift noticeably. What previously seemed like a straightforward first-person narrative has become self-referential and malleable.

Nyugen plays with this structural malleability in the chapters that follow. The narrator has insisted throughout the book's pages that he finds it easy to shift between perspectives, and soon the chapter perspectives begin to shift, too—one chapter is told in the third person, from the perspective of the narrator's consciousness floating above his body and passively watching the scene below. In another, the narrator's consciousness splits, and he shifts from using the singular first-person "I" to narrating as "we."

Nyugen makes a unique characterization choice in addition to his structural ones: many of the characters in The Sympathizer are never given names. This includes the protagonist, but also many of the characters in his daily life—his boss is only ever called "the General," and the General's wife is simply "Madame." The narrator is tasked with the assassination of a fellow veteran, referred to only as "the major" or, more often, "the crapulent major." The narrator fights with "the Auteur" on a movie set and befriends "the philosophical medic" during a reconnaissance mission.

This lack of names has the effect of distancing the narrator from the majority of those around him, casting them as archetypal, expendable stand-ins for a type of person as much as they represent a specific character. A reader might assume there to be some deliberate irony on behalf of the author here—one of the narrator's...