阮清越小说《同情者》中的记忆工业和混血儿身份困境

The novel The Sympathizer by Vietnamese American author Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The story primarily follows the anonymous captain embedded within the South Vietnamese army, who leads a double life as a spy in both Vietnam and the United States. This paper, by incorporating Nguyen's literary, historical, and cultural critiques of existing discourses such as memory, history, and the construction of race, analyzes issues of ethnicity, war, and the ethics of memory embedded in the novel. This critique is vividly dramatized in the novel's depiction of "Hamlet," a pseudo-film about the Vietnam War directed by a pompous American director which serves as a direct parody of Hollywood's orientalist and dehumanizing portrayals of the conflict. Through the protagonist's experience as a consultant on this film, Nguyen satirizes the industry's refusal to grant Vietnamese people interiority, reducing them to mere symbols or backdrop for an American moral tragedy. It argues that emerging Asian American writers, represented by Nguyen, use the writing of transminority historical trauma as a means to reflect on racism and resist global cultural hegemony.