"I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar": Multiplicity, Melancholy, and (Mis)Recognition in Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer

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2019
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Award
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Asian Americanness is often described using language that marks this racial categorization’s hybridity and liminality -- the way that they are white, but not white enough and yet the way that they don’t cleanly fit into the category of “colored” either. Drawing from the often overlooked, historically tense racial tensions of Asian immigrants in America, I explore the consequences of America’s unspoken yet violent history towards Asian American (immigrants) through Viet Thanh Nguyen’s racially mixed (Vietnamese/European), hybrid spy protagonist/narrator. Unable to come to terms with the physically, biologically, and ideologically in-betweenness of himself, the narrator struggles to come to terms with his inability to belong, which consequently leads to a failure to adequately construct a narrative/story for himself. I argue that the narrator’s eruptions of violence and his inability to acknowledge these eruptions are a result of his inability to mourn -- and get over -- parts of himself that are excess, that prevent him from belonging, similar to the ways that America as a nation fails to acknowledge and thus “mourn” the violence and harm that it has done onto others. The novel’s confessional form allows the narrator to “write himself” in a way that enables him to confront this melancholy. I read the novel’s eventual break from the confession and the adoption of a less structured liminal form as a mode of mourning, acceptance, and reconstruction for the hybrid narrator.
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