The Sympathizer Characters
The main characters in The Sympathizer include the narrator, Man, and Bon.
- The narrator is an unnamed double agent, the son of a Vietnamese mother and French father, who works for a South Vietnamese general while spying for the North.
- Man is the narrator’s handler and childhood friend. Near the end of the novel, he is revealed to have risen to the rank of commissar in the Northern Vietnamese forces.
- Bon is a childhood friend of the narrator’s and Man’s. Sincerely loyal to the Southern cause, he is ignorant of the narrator’s status as a double agent.
Characters
The Narrator
The narrator is an unnamed army captain in the Southern forces during the Vietnam War. He's the aide-de-camp to a high-ranking general and uses this embedded position to gain intelligence about Southern strategy in his undercover capacity as a spy for the Northern communists.
As the secret child of an unwed Vietnamese mother and the French priest that employed her, the narrator struggles throughout the text with feelings of alienation that abstract him somewhat from those around him. This, he explains, is both a benefit and a deficiency in his life—because he comes from a place of ambiguity, he struggles to feel a unilateral allegiance to any one group. More positively, it also allows him to easily and confidently understand both sides of an issue even when they appear to conflict with each other. This tendency toward subjectivity allows him to maintain a deep, familial brotherhood with his two best friends from childhood, Man and Bon, despite one being a fellow Northern spy and the other being a Southern assassin.
As the novel progresses, the narrator's confidence in his work begins to falter. While he's loquacious and sharp, and naturally excels at the communication- and intelligence-focused aspects of his work, he soon finds himself pressed to commit escalating acts of violence with his own hands. This, for him, is new and uncomfortable—he's a talker, not a fighter. As he descends further into hands-on violence, he begins to fixate deeply on those he's harmed. By the time the novel concludes, his participation in violence and torture has contributed to a full mental breakdown at the hands of interrogators. Following this experience, he believes himself to be a plural entity of separate body and mind and uses the pronoun "we" instead of "I."
The text itself is primarily structured in the form of his written first-person confession, delivered to an unnamed commandant after the majority of the story's events have concluded. At times, he himself questions his own memory and account of the events therein; for this reason, it can be assumed that the narrator is not necessarily objectively reliable.
Man
Man, who acts as the narrator's secret handler in his role as a spy within the Southern ranks, is the narrator's childhood friend. Much of the narrator's own trajectory can be traced to Man's formative influence in their youth. He's philosophical and wise, and although they're the same age, the narrator sees him as a sage-like figure.
When Man and the narrator cross paths in the camp after the narrator's capture, he's become a high-ranking commissar with power and influence in the North. This, ostensibly, aligns well with his lifelong goals. But to the captured narrator, he finally admits that he, too, has lost his faith in the cause and no longer knows who he is without it.
Bon
Bon is the third member of the narrator and Man's triumvirate of lifelong friendship. Unlike the other two men, his allegiance to the Southern forces is sincere.
During the violent evacuation from Saigon that begins the narrative, Bon's wife and son are killed. For the majority of the text, the reader knows him only as a man hardened by grief and invigorated by violence. When the narrator is tasked with two assassinations, Bon guides him through them with expert assistance. Eventually, it's revealed that Bon's comfort with violence has some precedent—in the army, he was an assassin.
The General and Madame
The General is the narrator's direct superior during his tenure in the Southern forces.
He is confident, righteous, and assured in the superiority of Southern capitalism, and his life...
(This entire section contains 1077 words.)
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revolves around his military career. He implicitly trusts the narrator as his closest confidant and tasks him with handling all his correspondence and administrative work.
Though he is nominally in charge, he's portrayed as a man who frequently needs to be steered toward a good idea before he can see it for himself. Most often, these ideas originate with the narrator or with the General's wife, Madame, whom the narrator seems to consider her husband's intellectual and strategic superior.
When the General and Madame discover that the narrator has been courting their daughter Lana in secret, the relationship is irreparably damaged. They tell him they're immensely disappointed in him—he should know, they insist, that as a "bastard," he's simply not good enough for her.
The Major
The major, almost always referred to by the narrator as the "crapulent major" as though that were his given name, is a fellow Vietnamese refugee. When the General grows suspicious that there is a spy in their ranks, he demands to know who the narrator might suspect. Desperate to avoid detection, the narrator offers a random name in the hopes of distracting the General: the major's.
The narrator is then ordered to kill the major in order to "neutralize" the situation. When he does, his actions begin to haunt him—he starts to see apparitions of the major in his daily life, and they often taunt and tease him in ways that might be assumed to signify the narrator's own neuroses.
Sonny
Sonny, a fellow immigrant, was a contemporary of the narrator’s during his college years in the United States. After the narrator returns, he's surprised (and a little dismayed) to see the familiar face—his old rival is not only still in the area, but is now running a Vietnamese-language newspaper that requires him to routinely insert himself into the refugee community. Soon, the rivalry has taken on a new angle—they vie for the affections of the same woman, Sofia Mori, and to the narrator's dismay, she chooses the journalist.
The General sees Sonny as a different sort of threat: in his newspaper, he's publicly asking questions that the General doesn't care for. The General orders the narrator to kill Sonny, but when the narrator goes to the journalist's house, he sees a rare possible ally and tries to confess instead. Sonny doesn't believe the narrator's assertion of communist allegiance, and the reluctant narrator finally works up the courage to shoot him.
From that point on, Sonny joins the major in the narrator's antagonistic hallucinations.
The Commandant
The commandant, unnamed throughout the text, is the person to whom the narrator's confession is written. Little is revealed about him, except that he has very little faith in the narrator's capacity for rehabilitation and insists on the confession being rewritten repeatedly until it meets his expectations.
