Department of English

Press reviews and scholarship have cast Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer primarily as a Vietnam War novel; however, in examining its unnamed narrator’s mixed race and its implications, I offer a reading in which a character’s mixedness is not co-opted to represent something else, but read as deserving of its own analysis and the narrator himself as a self-representative mixed subject. In The Sympathizer, mixedness – what I define as the quality of being multiracial – acts as a mode that enables the unnamed Vietnamese and white narrator to move through physical, narrative, chronological, and embodied liminal spaces, thus embracing the concept of displacement as identity. In doing so, the narrator disrupts binary characterizations of mixed identities, rejects the post-racial idealization of mixed identities, and pushes back against valorized notions of home and wholeness. By demonstrating how the narrator inhabits Trinh T. Minh-ha and Homi K. Bhabha’s “unhomely” liminal spaces, while also moving between and among the boundaries that delineate these spaces, my analysis refutes Sheng-mei Ma’s assertion that mixed Asian characters are converted exclusively and statically to either an Asian or American identity by presenting mixedness as its own fluid category with unique challenges and experiences. Methodologically, I critique binary approaches to race and to literary criticism that aims to settle and parse something as amorphous as mixed identity, and instead invite the nuance and threats to racial hierarchy that unsettled, non-binary racial identities entail.