NEITHER HERE NOR THERE. Liminal Spaces and the Vietnam War in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone
NEITHER HERE NOR THERE. Liminal Spaces and the Vietnam War in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone

Summary/Abstract: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2016) and Tim O’Brien’sIf I Die in a Combat Zone (2003) present apparently twofold perspectiveson the Vietnam War, but—in fact—they are equally informative sources of dismalreverberations regarding both Vietnamese and American interpretationsof the war events. Thus, they construct an unequivocal image of the war, whichhas turned out to be detrimental for both parties. In this paper, I investigatethe liminal state of both protagonists in order to illustrate that the Vietnam Warhas proved destructive to either participating side. The authors of both novelsprovide apparently dissimilar portrayals of the war circumstances and its ramifications.However, after a closer examination, accounts which emerge fromtheir narratives seem equally sinister and overwhelming. The concept of liminality,employed as a tool to illustrate the mental state of each protagonist,enables us to capture their “in-betweenness” and allows for investigating theirinner passage. Such an approach opens more possibilities for interpretation,since there are interstitial spaces that need to be examined in order to definethe characters’ transition. The conceptualization of a British anthropologist,Victor Turner, which inscribes into this theorization, appears indispensablefor discerning certain shifts, translocations and transfigurations of the subjectin a process of change.

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