The Sympathizer

The ghosts of both Sonny and the crapulent major are with the narrator; they represent the guilt and shame he feels surrounding their deaths. The ghosts’ playfulness and their disturbingly morbid humor, speaks to the tragicomic nature of war, and perhaps life in general.

In a decorative jar sitting on the Commandant’s desk, the two-headed baby coalesces a number of different ideas scattered throughout The Sympathizer: America as a corrupting and destructive force, the duality of the narrator, the grotesque absurdity of his very existence. 

White is both a color of rebirth and a color of mourning. In a more literal sense, it is also the color of colonialism and oppression. In Chapter 11, the narrator recalls the white room in which a “white lump” formed on the throat of the Watchman, a man whom the narrator had driven to suicide with torture (192). During the narrator’s own torture, he is flooded with bright white lights, which “cleanses” him in the most brutal way possible—there is a comparison to be drawn here between white colonizers and the white lights in the way that both “cleanse” through violent means. In Chapter 22, during the height of the Commissar’s torture of the narrator, the Commissar begins to laugh.