Chapters 10–12 Summary and Analysis
Chapter 10
Finally arriving on set, the Auteur throws a party. Struggling to feel at home with the rest of the Western cast and crew, the narrator finds himself grateful for the presence of the extras—local Vietnamese refugees, hired for a pittance and given no lines. Disheartened, he soon realizes that his attempts at better representation for the film's Vietnamese characters have been futile. Three Vietnamese speaking roles have been added, but they'll be played by a Filipino man, a Korean American man, and a British Chinese woman. No suitable Vietnamese actors could be found, Violet insists, so this is better. "You'll see," she tells him.
Before the filming of one especially gratuitous scene depicting a sexual assault, the narrator suggests to the Auteur that it may not be necessary. The Auteur, incensed yet again, dissents, calling the narrator a sellout and a loser, leaving the narrator to wonder if he might be both.
Watching the laborious filming of the interrogation scenes, the narrator reflects on his military education and realizes he knows firsthand something nobody else on this production knows—beating someone is awfully hard work.
Chapter 11
As production on the movie continues, the narrator becomes even more confident than before that the film is just one more piece of blatant, gratuitous propaganda designed to inoculate the rest of the world against his people. Doubtful that his attempts to infiltrate the production are in any way meaningful, he takes solace in the affirming letters he receives from Man while on set. His comrade reminds him of a famous speech by Mao, given at Yan'an, where the Chairman insisted that art and literature were crucial elements of revolution but also tools used for domination.
Musing on the evolution of his relationship with Man, their shared philosophies, and the seminal communist literature that came before them, the narrator notes the behavior of the extras—who, despite their desperation, typically spend their dollar a day on drinks after finishing up the day's work—and wonders if his attempts to intervene have been completely futile.
Learning that the script has changed to accommodate the leftover explosives and that the cemetery will soon be blown up, the narrator asks the set designer for a brief final visit. Granted a promise of thirty minutes before the explosion, he runs to the cemetery to say goodbye to his mother's honorary tombstone. As he's saying a private goodbye, an explosion nearly knocks him unconscious. The demolition has begun ahead of schedule, and he's knocked unconscious by one of the blasts.
Waking up some time later, he finds himself in a hospital bed. A doctor stops by and tells him he's lucky to be alive, and four extras visit with a fruit basket and a bottle of whiskey from the Auteur. Awkwardly, they posit that there's a rumor going around—they think The Auteur did it on purpose.
In the all-white hospital room, the narrator struggles to get comfortable. It's too close, he remembers, to the only other all-white room he's spent time in: one designed to deprive a prisoner he was helping interrogate of stimuli in the hopes of breaking his resolve.
Chapter 12
Upon release from the hospital, the narrator returns home to Los Angeles and is grateful to see Bon at the airport. On arrival, he learns that the General and Madame have taken his advice—as a method of funneling money to their cause, they've opened a restaurant. The staff, he notices, are all ex-military, but in the restaurant's shabby uniforms, they no longer look like killers.
They've begun, the General tells him excitedly, to plan the first...
(This entire section contains 1028 words.)
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reconnaissance team that will return to the homeland. Bon, they tell him, has volunteered, and the narrator realizes that his friend has done sobecause of the danger, not despite it. Intent on keeping Bon safe, the narrator says that he'll go, too, but the General refuses.
After their meal, he debriefs the General and Madame on his experiences on the film set, omitting just the surprise happy ending—during his hospital stay, the Auteur's lawyers dropped off a $10,000 check to compensate him for his injuries. There seems to be, he notes to himself, just one lasting consequence—a portion of his memory seems to be missing. Upon cashing the check, he pays a visit to the major's widow and offers her half.
She insists he stay for dinner, introducing him to her children, but he can only feign affection. From the time he was a child himself, he muses, he hasn't liked children much—with the exception of Bon and Man, whom he met when they both honorably came to his rescue on the playground.
Leaving the widow's house, the narrator takes a spontaneous trip to Sofia Mori's apartment. When she invites him inside, he's dismayed to discover that Sonny is there, too—in his absence, the two have begun a relationship.
Analysis
In chapters 10–12, the narrator's capacity for self-reflection reaches a new level. As his guilt over the major's death becomes more pervasive, guilt itself becomes the prevailing theme in other areas of his life, too.
He feels guilty about his presence on the movie set, constantly justifying to himself that his trip is a righteous action, not just a vacation undertaken for personal benefit. He tells himself unconvincingly that he's there to "undermine the enemy's propaganda" but truly accepts it only when a letter from Man reminds him of the propagandistic dangers of art and literature.
When he wakes up in the all-white hospital room, he can't rest—suffused with guilt yet again, he can only fixate on how his surroundings evoke the white interrogation cells he once used to extract information. Later, when he's paid $10,000 in that same room, his guilt about the major's death leads him to keep it a secret—instead of telling the General, he quietly gives half to the major's widow under the guise of a nonexistent promise to her husband when he was alive.
As he reckons with new regret over old mistakes in these chapters, the narrator begins to develop a significantly more nuanced understanding of his own responsibility and the consequences of his actions.
