역사기록 메타픽션의 미학과 기억의 정치학: 비엣 타인 응우옌의 동조자 를 중심으로

초록

This article examines the aesthetics of historiographic metafiction and the politics of memory in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. Utilizing Linda Hutcheon’s theoretical framework, the study demonstrates how the novel destabilizes the traditional boundary between historical fact and literary fiction through sophisticated narrative strategies such as self-reflexivity, parody, and intertextuality. The analysis focuses on the novel’s ‘confessional frame,’ which functions as a meta-narrative tool to expose the instability of memory and the coercive power of ideological surveillance. By portraying a narrator with a divided identity—a communist sleeper agent who is also a CIA collaborator—Nguyen illustrates the fractured subjectivity inherent in the postcolonial experience. A central component of this study is the critique of the fictional film The Hamlet, a direct parody of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. This episode serves to dismantle Hollywood’s mythic aura and reveals how Vietnamese suffering has been systematically appropriated to serve American existential narratives and the ‘memory industry.’ Furthermore, the study explores how the depiction of torture in the novel links the Vietnam War to modern conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, highlighting the persistence of imperial violence and CIA interrogation techniques across decades. By incorporating paratextual references to historical documents and refugee testimonies, Nguyen situates the Vietnam War within a global history of violence and forgetting and restores silenced voices to the official record. The conclusion interprets the narrator’s ultimate embrace of “nothing” as a paradoxical liberation from oppressive binary ideologies.

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