The Sympathizer

Of his friends, he is the only “true believer” in the National Liberation Front (the anti-Communists). “Bon,” the narrator says, “had the appearance of a good-looking man beaten to a pulp, except that was simply his God-given face” (11). We learn that Bon became an anti-Communist when he watched a Communist execute his father. A conservative man, Bon’s primary motivations in life are his wife, son, and defending his country; after his wife and son are killed, he is destitute until given the mission to kill the crapulent major. While Bon is not a necessarily a bad person, once his wife and child die, his primary purpose becomes being an assassin for the counterrevolution being waged by the General.

Bon is gruff in his manner of speech, and he is probably the least intelligent of the friends. He, like the narrator, also has an alcohol abuse problem, which grows particularly unwieldy when living in America as the bouncer in the General’s liquor store.

Man is a Communist revolutionary to whom the narrator reports throughout his exile in Los Angeles. Man, like Bon, is the narrator’s best friend, practically family—which makes it all the more chilling, then, when Man is revealed to be the Commissar, a top figure in the Communist hierarchy who is responsible for the narrator’s torture in the camp.

After a napalm bombing, Man is disfigured. He loses the majority of the skin on his face, his ears, and practically his entire nose, rendering him “a monster” and ostracizing him from his wife and child. Ironically, with half a face, Man seems able to better relate to the narrator, the man with two minds.

The narrator serves as the General’s aide-de-camp, his right-hand man. The General’s wife, known only as Madame, is a proper Vietnamese woman, who frowns upon her eldest daughter Lana’s rebellious, Americanized ways. While the narrator genuinely seems to respect the General at times, that does not stop the narrator from betraying the General on multiple occasions: By reporting his every movement to the Communist party, of course, but also by sleeping with his daughter Lana. 

The crapulent major is an affable, corpulent man, falsely accused by the narrator for being the mole in the General’s innercircle. When we learn the details of the crapulent major’s life—that he is a good person, his wife loves him very much, he has two newborn twin sons—the reader feels as guilty as the narrator at his wrongful death. The narrator is haunted by the crapulent major’s ghost, a symbol of his intense guilt over the murder, for the duration of the book. 

A former classmate of the narrator, Sonny is the editor of a local newspaper. He is murdered by the narrator, as ordered by the General, because he leaked compromising information about the General’s commando army in Los Angeles. Like the crapulent major, the narrator is haunted by Sonny’s ghost after his murder; unlike the crapulent major, the narrator is directly responsible for killing Sonny. Sonny is the first person that the narrator has ever murdered. Compounding the narrator’s shame over Sonny’s death is the fact that the narrator’sformer lover Ms. Mori and Sonny were falling in love.

Ms. Mori is a middle-aged, Japanese-American woman, who engages in a casual sexual relationship with the narrator. She represents a somewhat cynical, very intelligent modern American woman.

Potentially modeled after Francis Ford Coppola, the Auteur is the hot-headed director of The Hamlet, who does not take kindly to the narrator’s criticisms of his work.