ABSTRACT
Anger and empathy might be thought of as opposed states; if empathy is to “feel with,” then anger could be said to “feel against.” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer, seeks to negotiate a balance between, on one hand, anger at historical, systemic crimes such as colonialism, neo-imperialism, war, rape, racism, exploitation, and oppression, and, on the other hand, empathy even for one’s enemies. Nguyen’s explicit project is to combine empathy and anger to explore the wider ethical possibilities of relating to the Other. This chapter explores how The Sympathizer seeks to intervene in debates on our affective relations to “the Other,” demanding a radical ethics of recognizing the other while also understanding historical culpability. The very structure of the novel, with its multiplied figures and meanings, reflects this ethical project.
