A Palimpsest Of Bodily Costs Of The Vietnam War In The Sympathizer

Modern body politics has the tendency to edit obscene bodily injuries out of public perception through the focalization of political and technical issues in war.This selective representation of war not only desensitizes people to violence,but also allows for the ongoing rhetoric of the legitimacy of wars.In the light of this,Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer epitomizes a resistant effort to press the overwhelming evidence to the monstrous violence and massive human costs in the Vietnam War onto the readers’ consciousness.Aligning with Elaine Scarry’s insight into the inexpressibility of physical suffering and structural and discursive analysis of physical suffering in relation to torture and war,the thesis pays particular attention to the bodily costs of the Vietnam War in The Sympathizer and presents an analysis of how Viet Thanh Nguyen reconnects the readers to the abusive power when the massive bodily costs of war subject to omission and appropriation successfully elude public perception.The main body of the thesis consists of three parts: Chapter One delves into the abuse of discursive mechanism,by which the egomaniacal state rhetoric folds the war’s physical consequences in perverted descriptions favorable to its nation building and lends legitimacy to its violence.Chapter Two analyzes the complicity between the Vietnamese’s self-generated silence on their physical suffering and the prevailing description of war,which further assists in their disappearance in the public spheres.Chapter Three turns to Nguyen’s making of civilization that has been previously undone by physical and discursive violence.He not only tries to invoke the readers’ affective reckoning through the visceral-ethical writing,but also seeks a panethnic solidarity premised on the shared experience of diaspora.The thesis concludes that Nguyen’s very act of retelling of the Vietnam War and other relevant texts(i.e.,crossmedia and intertextual references)in The Sympathizer creates a discursive-ethical palimpsest,in which the invisible human costs of war acquire the material forms,while the multilayered palimpsests of ethnic writing forge a choral,forceful voice that collectively leads the readers toward a fair understanding of war.