Conflict permeates The Sympathizer at every possible level of analysis. At each of these levels, the conflict is primarily driven by power dynamics—who has power over whom; what power, if any, can be found in resistance and revolution; whether inaction is a form of power itself; and what happens when power transfers from one party to the other.

Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the story at its broadest level is driven by the geopolitical conflicts between North and South Vietnam, East and West, and communist and capitalist ideologies. As power shifts among the involved entities, the lives and allegiances of the novel's characters shift alongside them. For some, this results in dramatic life changes—Bon, for example, goes from being a military assassin to a janitor. For others, like the narrator, this precipitates an existential crisis—when those who resist power achieve power themselves, he realizes, the only thing that changes is who is unfairly oppressed.

As he comes to terms with his culpability in the book's final chapters, he begins to realize that power is not always explicit. If he had the power to intervene at a critical moment and opted for self-preservation instead, that doesn't make him a bystander—it makes him a complicit participant in the atrocity.

Throughout The Sympathizer, the narrator's comfort with moral ambiguity proves to be a strength and a weakness in equal measure.

As a man who feels naturally at ease shifting between worlds and perspectives, he moves easily between the environments his double life requires him to occupy. And yet, a recurring motif is that belonging partially everywhere robs him of the certainty that he fully belongs anywhere.

This ability to see both sides of an issue also allows him to justify acts that someone with a more traditional sense of morality probably wouldn't accept. In chapter 6, when he's tasked with killing the major, he rationalizes that the major has probably participated in something bad, even if it's not the thing he's supposed to execute him for, which means the action itself might not be as bad as he thinks:

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. ... The major had the right to live, but I was right to kill him, wasn't I?

The narrator opens the book by announcing that he's a man of two minds. By the final chapter, this has come to pass in a sense that, if one believes his account, might be called literal—the narrator believes himself to be split cleanly down the middle, spiritually bifurcated by a strange ritual during his interrogation. He's certain enough of this to adopt the plural first-person pronoun "we" as he finishes his story, finally embodying a duality that matches the double life he's been living all along.

Throughout the narrative, Nyugen's text examines the critical role information plays in political conflict.

In a story set in the world of military intelligence, information is an extremely valuable currency with tangible consequences. The veracity and timeliness of information are both life-or-death variables—in one instance, late information is never received and an agent is arrested, tortured, sexually assaulted, and imprisoned. Later, false information is delivered in fear, and the major ends up dead as an almost random casualty. When the narrator tries, for once, to share the truth with a perceived ally, he's assumed to be an untrustworthy source, and Sonny, too, dies.

Propaganda, in particular, is critically examined through the sequence in which the...