In March 2017, the

published an article entitled “The Long History of the Vietnam Novel”. The piece was part of a series of editorials exploring the cultural impact of the Vietnam War and marking the passage of exactly five decades since 1967, “a year that changed the war and changed America”. While the article passed judgment on a telling national “amnesia” that had inhibited literary treatments of Vietnam for about ten years after the fall of Saigon, its take on the subsequent “flowering of Vietnam literature” (Ryan) since the mid-1980s displayed another regrettable amnesia: it included only works by and about American soldiers and journalists, forgetting the literary voices of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans.

This cultural myopia may have been the norm

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Citation: Chura, Patrick. "The Sympathizer". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 July 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38741, accessed 23 November 2024.]