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

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2016) and Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone (2003) present apparently twofold perspectives on the Vietnam War, but—in fact—they are equally informative sources of dismal reverberations regarding both Vietnamese and American interpretations of the war events. Thus, they construct an unequivocal image of the war, which has turned out to be detrimental for both parties. In this paper, I investigate the liminal state of both protagonists in order to illustrate that the Vietnam War has proved destructive to either participating side. The authors of both novels provide apparently dissimilar portrayals of the war circumstances and its ramifications. However, after a closer examination, accounts which emerge from their 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 their inner passage. Such an approach opens more possibilities for interpretation, since there are interstitial spaces that need to be examined in order to define the characters’ transition. The conceptualization of a British anthropologist, Victor Turner, which inscribes into this theorization, appears indispensable for discerning certain shifts, translocations and transfigurations of the subject in a process of change.