A Bastard’s Confession: National Forgetting, Remasculinization, and the Ethics of Just Memory in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the representation and critique of Asian masculinity and patriarchy in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. In his written confession, the narrator retraces the events after the Fall/Liberation of Saigon during his espionage on the defected South Vietnamese veterans who try to reclaim their country while relocated to the U.S. as refugees. The metatextual, confessional form of the novel embodies the act of remembering and forgetting, writing and rewriting. This paper argues that the narrator, ostracized as a “bastard” due to his biracial parentage, observes the interlocking of patriarchy and nationhood from the perspective of a marginalized outsider of Vietnamese society. The paper first examines the marginalization of the narrator as a bastard within the patriarchal Vietnamese society. Then, the paper analyzes how the process of remasculinization is incorporated into the General’s mission of rebuilding nationhood and how it inevitably fails. Finally, the paper assesses the narrator’s masculinist tendencies which inform his written confession. While the bastard narrator is a minoritarian subject that problematizes the ideology of nationhood that is based on heteronormative patrilineage, he himself is also a problematic figure whose masculinism lead him to purposely forget and erase his own involvements in acts of violence afflicted upon women. The narrator’s final act of remembrance enacts Nguyen’s notion of just memory.