A Study Of Spiritual Predicament In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer From The Perspective Of Hauntology

Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of the most promising writers in contemporary American literature,and most of his works have won many famous awards,nominations or mentions in best books of the year lists.What we should pay attention to in the process of Nguyen’s astoundingly rapid success is the challenging work of figuring out how to write about the intellectual and artistic problems generated by national literature and geopolitics.His first novel,The Sympathizer,won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction among other accolades.The Sympathizer plays on the convention in war fiction of creating a story-world where the soldier stands at the center of a world marked by lines dividing friend from enemy,battle zone from home front,military from civilian.Guided by Derrida’s hauntology,this thesis explores the spiritual predicament of Vietnamese refugees aroused by specters in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer.Nguyen repeatedly takes advantage of the specter image to render the novel a mysterious and strange atmosphere,and emphasizes the connection between the specter and human being’s spiritual world.In The Sympathizer,Nguyen reveals the phenomenon that Vietnamese refugees are haunted by various specters from the war,which finally makes their spiritual world collapse.Therefore it hopes mankind to cherish peace and never give up hope even in adversity.Besides introduction and conclusion,the body of this thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter one is a brief introduction to Viet Thanh Nguyen,The Sympathizer,and the literature review on it at home and abroad.Chapter two analyzes how the captain generates disorder of cognition in the spectral shadow and cannot identify the real world because of the specter’s collapsing binary between presence and absence.Chapter three depicts most Vietnamese refugees’ alienation from the outside world due to the haunting of memory,including the Captain’s self-doubting and other veterans’ reality-escaping.Chapter four demonstrates the Captain’s collapse of faith with the specter of impracticable justice.With the specter of killed innocent and stigmatized Vietnam,the Captain loses his belief about justice and feels hopeless.Chapter five is the conclusion,indicating the realistic significance of this thesis to stopping the war and paying attention to the well-being of disadvantaged groups.The thesis aims to interpret Vietnamese spiritual predicament after the war with Derrida’s hauntology,and instruct people to recognize and deal with our spiritual crisis reasonably.For one thing,the openness and uncertainty of specters require people to get rid of dogmatic cognition of the real world.Hauntology is a criticism of the rigidity of presence,so human beings are supposed to deal with the specters which cause our spiritual predicament flexibly.For another,although in adversity we should believe human beings will break free from any doctrine and have peace and justice one day.