The Sympathizer: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

The longer the narrator works on the movie, the more convinced he is that he isn’t a technical consultant on an artistic project but an infiltrator into a propagandistic work. The Auteur will regard his work as art, but that’s foolish. Movies are “America’s way of softening up the rest of the world” until the day when they, too, are bombed by the planes they see in the movies. Man understands Hollywood’s propagandistic function. The narrator writes to him, concerned about the relevance of his work on the film, and Man responds with his most detailed message yet. He tells the narrator to remember Chairman Mao Zedong’s message at Yan’an about art and literature being crucial to revolution. This is Man’s way of telling the narrator that his mission with the movie is important because of what the film represents: the world’s willingness to absorb American ideas.

The climax of the film is a firefight at King Cong’s lair, resulting in its “vaporization by the U.S. Air Force.” Magnificent sets are destroyed and enormous supplies of canned smoke are released. Large quantities of detonation cord and explosives are used, sending all the local birds and beasts away in fear, while the crew walks around with cotton in their ears. Destroying the hamlet where King Cong hides isn’t enough, of course, to satisfy an American audience; all the extras are killed off, too. The script calls for the deaths of several hundred Viet Cong and Laotians, though there are only a hundred extras. To solve the problem, most of them die more than once. Some die four or five times.

The Auteur insists that, long after the Vietnam War is forgotten, this work of art “will not just be about the war but it will be the war.” The narrator finds this statement absurd. There’s some truth to it, but, in the Auteur’s egomaniacal imagination, it’s only his art that he imagines will survive the memory of the four or six million dead “who composed the real meaning of the war.” The narrator feels despondent about his work on the film. He altered the script in some places, but he did nothing to change the direction of the film. He sees himself as nothing more than a garment worker in a factory owned by wealthy white people, doing no more than making sure the stitching is right.

The technology used to obliterate the narrator’s people comes from the military-industrial complex of which Hollywood is a part. The Auteur decides to improvise with “the plentiful quantities of leftover gasoline and explosives.” The special effects people get instructions to “rig the cemetery for destruction.” The cemetery is spared in the original script but, in the final scene, the Auteur wants to illustrate “the true depravity” of both sides in the war. In this scene, a squad of suicidal guerillas find shelter among the tombs, where Captain Shamus calls for a white phosphorus strike. The narrator tells Harry about how much he loves the cemetery. Harry tells him that, since the special effects guys have already prepared it for destruction, he’ll only have thirty minutes to take a picture of it before it’s destroyed.

Though it’s only a fake cemetery with a fake tombstone that the narrator dedicated to his mother, it still hurts him to know that it’ll be destroyed. He pays his last respects to his mother and the cemetery. With his camera around his neck, he passes the names on the headstones, which Harry copied from the Los Angeles phonebook. Among the names of those who are actually living, that of the narrator’s mother is the only one that belongs. He kneels down at the tombstone that he reserved for her to say goodbye. He hears “the disembodied voice of the crapulent major, chuckling.” A giant clap of noise suddenly deafens the narrator. He then feels a slap in the face so strong that it lifts him from his knees and hurls him “through a blister of light.”

The narrator awakens in a bed that is “shielded by a white curtain.” He has first-degree burns, smoke inhalation, bruises, and a concussion. The doctor tells him that he’s in relatively good shape—really, he should be dead, given the force of the explosion. The four extras who played the Viet Cong torturers visit him in the hospital. They come with a fruit basket and a bottle of Johnnie Walker. One of the “torturers,” the tall sergeant, says that the gifts aren’t from them but from the Auteur.

The tall sergeant says that there’s a rumor that the incident wasn’t an accident. He and the other extras think that the Auteur did it in retaliation for the narrator insulting him. They say that they wouldn’t “put anything past the Americans.” The narrator tells them that they’re being paranoid, but he privately thinks that there’s some truth to it. The short extra thanks the narrator for his work during the shoot, particularly getting them extra pay and talking back to the director. They toast in the narrator’s honor.

After the extras leave, the narrator looks around the all-white hospital room and thinks about the only other all-white room he’s ever been in: the room at the National Interrogation Center back in Saigon. He and Claude tortured their prisoner there with an endless loop of music that he wouldn’t be able to stand: Country music. They found “Hey, Good Lookin’” by Hank Williams and blared the song into the prisoner’s room. They stopped only when the narrator was  questioning him. Claude assigned the narrator as the chief interrogator. His assignment for his graduation exam was to break the prisoner.

The narrator entered the Watchman’s cell, trying to figure out how to be both his enemy and his friend. The narrator told him that he was charged with subversion, conspiracy, and murder, but emphasized that he was innocent until proven guilty. The Watchman laughed. He found the expression stupid, especially in relation to how Americans regard the Vietnamese—as guilty until proven innocent. He told the narrator that, if he didn’t understand that his “masters” already believed that the Watchman was guilty, then he wasn’t as smart as he thought. He then called the narrator “a bastard” and blamed this for his defectiveness.

The narrator set out to prove to the Watchman that he was as smart as he thought he was, which meant smarter than the Watchman. The narrator sat at his desk and wrote the Watchman’s confession for him. He then handed it to him the next morning. The Watchman read it and found out that the narrator would spread the rumor that he was a homosexual, using this as the reason why he left his family. The narrator promised to print this confession in the newspaper, along with intimate photographs of him and his “lover,” which he would obtain with the help of hypnosis and drugs. The narrator said that, after the story was published, the Watchman’s revolutionary comrades would condemn him, and it would be equally impossible for him to return to his family. He would become a man who had sacrificed everything for nothing.

Claude praised the narrator’s work. The narrator felt like a good student, happy for Claude’s praise, which he earned from knowing what his teacher wanted. The Watchman was a bad student. He knew the Americans’ teachings but rejected them outright. The narrator was a better student for learning to be “sympathetic to the thinking of Americans.” One morning, a week after the Watchman read his confession, the narrator got a call at the officers’ quarters from the guard in the surveillance room. He went to the National Interrogation Center and found that Claude was already there.

Inside of his cell, the Watchman was curled up on his white bed, facing the white wall. He was wearing white shorts and a white T-shirt. When the narrator and Claude rolled him over, they saw that his face was purple and his eyes bulged. Deep in his mouth, at the back of his throat, was a white lump. For his good behavior in the past week, they gave him what he wanted for breakfast. He asked for hardboiled eggs. He ate the first two but swallowed the third whole, including the shell. Claude assured the narrator that it wasn’t his fault, but all the narrator could think of was how he wasn’t a bastard—unless, somehow, he was.