The Sympathizer

This chapter marks the end of the narrator’s confession. The narrator’s story has finally caught up to the present.

The narrator is seated in front of the Commandant at his desk, where the narrator’s 307-page confession sits before him. We learn that the narrator has spent the last year since the ambush in a redbrick isolation cell, “rewriting the many versions of my confession, the latest of which the commandant now possessed” (308). The narrator is in the first stage of the Communist “reeducation” process, which involves editing his confession until it reaches a “satisfactory state” according to the Commandant and the Commandant’s superior, known as the Commissar. The problem with his confession, the reason he has spent a year rewriting and editing his confession, is that the Commandant and Commissar find his writing too intellectual (“It is the language of the elite. You must write for the people!”) and also, because the narrator will not admit to being “a puppet soldier, an imperialist lackey, a brainwashed stooge, a colonized comprador, or treacherous henchman” (311).

The Commandant does not believe, it seems, that the narrator was an underground Communist. When the narrator says that he “lived [his] life for the revolution…the least to the revolution can grant [him] is the right to live above ground and be absolutely honest about what I have done” (315).