The Sympathizer

Without any further explanation about the Commissar’s identity, the narrator is stripped naked, bound and gagged. The narrator is taken someplace, and then tied to a mattress with a hood placed over his head. In darkness, the narrator believes that this must be some kind of test and, whatever it was, he was a good student, and would surely pass. “How did you end up here, with your best friend and blood brother overseeing your demise,” the narrator wonders (326). After hours of sleeplessness, he begins to lose track of time: “The monotony of darkness was challenging, and hunger was painful, but this constant wakefulness was even worse” (327). The narrator discovershe is being watched, and anytime he slips into sleep, he is kicked by a foot that begins to haunt him: “The foot would keep me awake until I died” (328).

After some unknowable period of time, Man enters the narrator’s torture chamber alone, so he can speak candidly. Man begins chastising the narrator for coming back: “You idiot!…Didn’t I tell you not to come?…Do you think I want to do this to you? I am doing my best to make sure that worse things don’t happen to you” (329) Man informs the narrator that, through torture, they “must access that safe hiding the last of your secrets” and “the longer we keep you awake, the better chance we have of cracking that safe” (330). The narrator insists he has told them everything, that he is hiding nothing. Man, in this private moment, philosophizes about the nature of revolution and suffering, reaching the conclusion that “certain things can be learned only through the feeling of excruciation,” foreshadowing the brutal torture that awaits the narrator (335).

At the beginning of chapter 21, the narrative shifts from a first-person to third-person perspective as the narrator is observed in a purely white room still tied to a mattress: “The prisoner had never known that he needed a respite from history, he who had committed his adult life to its hot pursuit” (339).

Still tied to the mattress, the hood is removed from the narrator’s eyes, but a grid composed of hundreds of light bulbs on full brightness are pressed to his face, preventing him from sleep. A metal device connected to a battery is attached to his foot, and every minute the device delivers an electric current that jolts him awake.

The narrator, weeping and begging to be allowed to sleep, finally begins to remember the memory they are seeking to unearth: The female Communist agent that was caught with the list of Special Branch agents in her mouth, the narrator not only failed to save her, but he watched as she was brutally raped by three South Vietnamese policemen. The narrator recounts the scene, in all its gory brutality. After the three policemen finish forcing themselves on her, they insist that she is dirty and proceed to violate her with a bottle of Coke: “After the policemen had flushed themselves from her, they left the drained bottle inside, buried to the throat of its neck” (352).

The end of the chapter returns to the first-person perspective, and the reader is brought back into the narrator’s increasingly erratic, sleep-deprived train of thought: “If the serpent of language had not bitten me, if I had never been born, if my mother was never cleft, if you need no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you let me sleep?” (354)