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The Narrator
The narrator describes him as a “thin man of excellent posture.” He is a veteran campaigner who has earned many medals. With his wife, Madame, he has five children, one of whom is Lan. He has only nine fingers and eight toes due to bullets and shrapnel. He is an epicure who enjoys good French wine, and a Christian—“in that order.” He favors French and American democracies over Communism. He speaks “precise, formal English.” Before arriving in Guam and then in California as a refugee, the General once spent a few months in the United States in 1958 as a junior officer, training at Fort Benning, Georgia with the Green Berets. There, he was permanently “inoculated” against Communism. He and Madame, like the narrator, settle in Los Angeles. They are sponsored by the sister-in-law of an American colonel who was once the General’s adviser. They live in a bungalow in a nice part of Los Angeles near Hollywood. He spends his first year in Los Angeles unemployed, alcoholic, and angry with his fate. After a year, he and his wife open a liquor store on Hollywood Boulevard. Among the refugees, however, his reputation as a general stands and he continues to fight against the Communists, ordering the killings of anyone suspected of working with the Viet Cong, including the crapulent major and Sonny. He also uses the funds from his liquor store, Madame’s restaurant, and a front organization dedicated to South Vietnamese veterans, to fund his guerrilla army in Vietnam.
The General Quotes in The Sympathizer
The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by The General or refer to The General. 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 8
Quotes
I had failed and the Auteur would make The Hamlet as he intended with my countrymen serving merely as raw material for an epic about white men saving good yellow people from bad yellow people. I pitied the French for their naiveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit. I was maddened by my helplessness before the Auteur's imagination and machinations. His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created […] In this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l’oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute; we were to be struck dumb.
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Chapter 15
Quotes
As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere. The General was deeply familiar with the nature, nuances, and internal differences of white people, as was every nonwhite person who had lived here a good number of years. We ate their food, we watched their movies, we observed their lives and psyche via television and in everyday contact, we learned their language, we absorbed their subtle cues, we laughed at their jokes, even when made at our expense, we humbly accepted their condescension, we eavesdropped on their conversations in supermarkets and the dentist's office, and we protected them by not speaking our own language in their presence, which unnerved them.
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The General Quotes in The Sympathizer
The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by The General or refer to The General. 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 8
Quotes
I had failed and the Auteur would make The Hamlet as he intended with my countrymen serving merely as raw material for an epic about white men saving good yellow people from bad yellow people. I pitied the French for their naiveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit. I was maddened by my helplessness before the Auteur's imagination and machinations. His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created […] In this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l’oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute; we were to be struck dumb.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15
Quotes
As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere. The General was deeply familiar with the nature, nuances, and internal differences of white people, as was every nonwhite person who had lived here a good number of years. We ate their food, we watched their movies, we observed their lives and psyche via television and in everyday contact, we learned their language, we absorbed their subtle cues, we laughed at their jokes, even when made at our expense, we humbly accepted their condescension, we eavesdropped on their conversations in supermarkets and the dentist's office, and we protected them by not speaking our own language in their presence, which unnerved them.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
