Alcohol And Power In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer combines genres of historical,political,black comedy and metafiction and is rich in irony,humor,metaphor and allusion.By setting the story in the transpacific space,multiethnic and multigender relations,and the form of recollection and flashback,the novel concerns issues such as war,torture,violence,identity,refugee,memory and discourse.Alcohol in the novel demonstrates the dynamics of power structures,indicating its potential of deconstruction and reconstruction.With alcohol writing,the novel shows that Vietnamese are economically exploited,politically manipulated and culturally dominated by the US during and after the Vietnam War.At the same time,Vietnamese elites in the US also conduct political and military violence on innocent people,in which circumstance Vietnamese refugees in the US experience lostness,dilemma and struggle for searching their identities and life meanings.Alcohol in the novel also indicates the fact that the Vietnamese body represented by the narrator is an unneglectable source of power structure formation and manipulation,and a capable subject to deconstruct the hegemonic structure by establishing transnational identity and sympathy.The thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter one,based on the narrator’s identity as a Vietnamese nationalist and his interaction with the power structure represented by his two Vietnamese superiors,illustrates symbolic meanings of alcohol in the military context,the function of alcohol in helping the General reconstruct his hegemonic power and the narrator’s moral dilemma reflected in his alcohol drinking.Chapter two focuses on the narrator’s identity as a biracial minority living in the US and his interaction with the power structure represented by American political and cultural elites and analyzes the function of alcohol in reflecting status,help achieving manipulation and exploitation.Chapter three focuses on the narrator’s interaction with other fellow refugees and immigrants and analyzes the role of alcohol in building brotherhood,resistance to transnational patriarchy,and development of sympathy.The thesis ultimately argues that alcohol generates rich meanings and significance in its correlation with power.The novel shows that it is one of the means by which the characters from different power structures unite and divide,manipulate and cooperate,control and resist;it is a reification of the hybrid narrator who essentially goes beyond the binary disparity and blurs the boundary between the reality and imagination,the fact and discourse,the object and the subject with its magic effect of drunkenness and sympathy,and ultimately recognizes and accepts himself.