De-Americanizing Viet Nam: The Representation of the “Vietnam War” in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

Abstract

[Abstract] Since the end of the war in Viet Nam in 1975, we, as a society, have been exposed to an American narrative that has manipulated our view of the conflict. We have been led to believe that the Vietnamese conflict was an American tragedy rather than a devastating war with a colonial background and fought on Southeast Asian soil. The purpose of this undergraduate thesis is first, to analyze the succession of events that resulted in the war in Viet Nam and the American participation in the same, and second, to examine how, after their non-defeat, Americans began controlling the story behind the war, releasing literary and cinematographic representations that placed Americans as the rightful victims of the war. In an attempt to redress such manipulation, I will employ Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer, published 40 years after the end of the conflict, as an example of a de-Americanized version of the war in Viet Nam, that is, a fictional version that portrays the war as, first and foremost, a Vietnamese conflict and tragedy. The aim of this analysis is to demonstrate how susceptible society is to believe the version of the story publicized by the country with more power and how influential America has been in creating misconceptions about Viet Nam and its war.