Identity Crisis Of The Vietnam War Refugee In The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen(1971—)is an influential contemporary Vietnamese American writer.His remarkable debut novel The Sympathizer depicts the post-war lives and identity crisis that the Vietnam War refugees have suffered in the modern American society from the point of view of Vietnamese.The thesis tries to make a study on the collective identity crisis of the Vietnam War refugees and highlights the particular identity crisis of the protagonist in The Sympathizer from the perspective of Homi Bhabha's postcolonialism.This thesis is divided into five chapters:Chapter One gives a brief introduction to Viet Thanh Nguyen and The Sympathizer,and then presents the literature review,motivation and significance of the thesis.Chapter Two deals with the panorama of the Vietnam War refugee's identity crisis and analyzes the collective identity crisis in the novel.It firstly introduces the history of the Vietnam War and its refugees,then gives a definition of cultural identity,illustrates the internal crisis encountered by the refugees in today's world,and discusses the collective identity crisis from The Sympathizer.Chapter Three presents the particular identity crisis of the double-consciousness protagonist in The Sympathizer.As the illegitimate child of a French priest and a Vietnamese maid,he has not been welcomed in Vietnam society.In American society,the protagonist employs mimicry as a strategy to construct his identity.He adopts two types of mimicry: one is mimicking for the obedient minority;the other is mimicking for the white elite.But it fails.Ultimately,the protagonist resides in the “Third Space” where he dismantles the stereotype of the Vietnamese in America.Chapter Four analyses Viet Thanh Nguyen's own identity crisis in America as a Vietnam War refugee by exploring Nguyen's writing motivation and style.In the collision of two cultures,Nguyen constructs his hybrid identity through writing.The “indeterminacy” of Nguyen's postmodernist writing is consistent with the refugee's wandering status,and is also a powerful vehicle to resists the historical writing of hegemony.Chapter Five is the conclusion that summarizes the similarity of the protagonist and Viet Thanh Nguyen: both of whom construct the hybrid identity in the “Third Space”.By writing The Sympathizer from a different angle,Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voices to voiceless Vietnam War refugees,and facilitates people's understanding of the Vietnam War refugee's status quo in the United States which at the same time provides a new perspective to America war literature from Vietnamese side and intensifies the narrative theme of refugee in Asian American literature.