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The Communist Agent
She is Man’s aunt and a Communist sympathizer to whom the narrator relays letters written in invisible ink. She is a Trotskyist and an anti-colonialist who once worked as a nurse. Man’s great-uncle fell in love with her, and she persuaded him to join the French Communists. Together, they remained in France and had a daughter. She lives in the thirteenth arrondissement, or district, of Paris. She has never officially joined the Communist Party and is, therefore, unlikely to be surveilled. She is a seamstress with three Siamese cats and no suspicious links. Man mentions that she has “no children,” which could mean that her daughter is no longer living. Very often, the narrator refers to her as “my Parisian aunt.”
The Parisian Aunt Quotes in The Sympathizer
The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by The Parisian Aunt or refer to The Parisian Aunt. 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 4
Quotes
But out of deference to our hosts we kept our feelings to ourselves, sitting close to one another on prickly sofas and scratchy carpets, our knees touching under crowded kitchen tables on which sat crenellated ashtrays measuring time’s passage with the accumulation of ashes, chewing on dried squid and the cud of remembrance until our jaws ached, trading stories heard second- and thirdhand about our scattered countrymen. This was the way we learned of the clan turned into slave labor by a farmer in Modesto, and the naive girl who flew to Spokane to marry her GI sweetheart and was sold to a brothel, and the widower with nine children who went out into a Minnesotan winter and lay down in the snow on his back with mouth open until he was buried and frozen and the ex-Ranger who bought a gun and dispatched his wife and two children before killing himself in Cleveland […] and the spoiled girl seduced by heroin who disappeared into the Baltimore streets […]
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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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The Parisian Aunt Quotes in The Sympathizer
The The Sympathizer quotes below are all either spoken by The Parisian Aunt or refer to The Parisian Aunt. 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 4
Quotes
But out of deference to our hosts we kept our feelings to ourselves, sitting close to one another on prickly sofas and scratchy carpets, our knees touching under crowded kitchen tables on which sat crenellated ashtrays measuring time’s passage with the accumulation of ashes, chewing on dried squid and the cud of remembrance until our jaws ached, trading stories heard second- and thirdhand about our scattered countrymen. This was the way we learned of the clan turned into slave labor by a farmer in Modesto, and the naive girl who flew to Spokane to marry her GI sweetheart and was sold to a brothel, and the widower with nine children who went out into a Minnesotan winter and lay down in the snow on his back with mouth open until he was buried and frozen and the ex-Ranger who bought a gun and dispatched his wife and two children before killing himself in Cleveland […] and the spoiled girl seduced by heroin who disappeared into the Baltimore streets […]
Related Characters:
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
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.
Related Characters:
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