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Claude
One of the narrator’s three “blood brothers,” along with Man. He is the husband of Linh and the father of Duc, who is also the narrator’s godson. He has the appearance of a handsome man who has been “beaten to a pulp.” He has large, “parachute-like ears” and a chin that looks as though it is “perpetually tucked into the folds of his neck.” His flat nose is “bent hard right.” Politically, he is conservative and “a genuine patriot” who has hated Communists since a local group of them forced his father, a village chief, to kneel in the village square and make a confession before shooting him behind the ear. As a former airman, he has the ability to jump out of airplanes, walk thirty miles with eighty pounds on his back, and hit a bull’s-eye with a pistol and rifle. Bon and the narrator became friends at lycée, where Bon jumped into a fight to protect the narrator from bullies who called him “unnatural.” Bon is a dedicated and obedient soldier. Under the General’s orders, he murders the crapulent major, calling it and all other politically-motivated murders “assassinations.” Later, they are both sent back to Vietnam to fight the General’s guerrilla war against the Communists. They are both also captured and sent to a detention camp for over a year, before being released by the Commissar and the Commandant and sent out of Vietnam.
Bon Quotes in The Sympathizer
The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by Bon or refer to Bon. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 14
Quotes
That very night, we snuck out of our dormitory and made our way to a tamarind grove, and under its boughs we cut our palms. We mingled our blood once more with boys we recognized as more kin to us than any real kin, and then gave one another our word.
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Chapter 23
Quotes
He was the commissar but he was also Man; he was my interrogator but also my only confidant; he was the fiend who had tortured me but also my friend. Some might say I was seeing things, but the true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus. We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same. Likewise, we often deceived overselves when we thought we saw ourselves most clearly.
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I was that man of two minds, me and myself. We had been through so much, me and myself. Everyone we met had wanted to drive us apart from each other, wanted us to choose either one thing or another, except the commissar. He showed us his hand and we showed him ours, the red scars as indelible as they were in our youth. Even after all we had been through, this was the only mark on our body.
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Bon Quotes in The Sympathizer
The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by Bon or refer to Bon. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 14
Quotes
That very night, we snuck out of our dormitory and made our way to a tamarind grove, and under its boughs we cut our palms. We mingled our blood once more with boys we recognized as more kin to us than any real kin, and then gave one another our word.
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23
Quotes
He was the commissar but he was also Man; he was my interrogator but also my only confidant; he was the fiend who had tortured me but also my friend. Some might say I was seeing things, but the true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus. We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same. Likewise, we often deceived overselves when we thought we saw ourselves most clearly.
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
I was that man of two minds, me and myself. We had been through so much, me and myself. Everyone we met had wanted to drive us apart from each other, wanted us to choose either one thing or another, except the commissar. He showed us his hand and we showed him ours, the red scars as indelible as they were in our youth. Even after all we had been through, this was the only mark on our body.
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