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The Sympathizer By Nguyen: An Analysis

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Virginia Woolf wrote an essay in 1929, titled Women and Fiction, that outlined the historical limitations on women’s writing and how the nature of work produced by women will change as social conditions change. The repercussions of a gender biased society are not the only issues that modern writers face. Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, deals with the consequences of racial prejudice and the experience of living as a nonwhite person in a white America. The many facets of an individual’s identity come together to form a unique perspective with unique sets of values and experiences. Toni Morrison, as a black woman, brings a new mode of storytelling to a common history in her novel Beloved. She is able to tell the story of a woman, an ex-slave, …show more content…

Each section of the book begins with a description of the house. In the first part “124 is spiteful”, in the second it is “loud”, and in the third “quiet” (3, 169, 239). This house is almost a character in the book, it is more than a place, it breathes and moves with the memories of the women that inhabit it. Stamp Paid describes the voices that surround the house while Beloved is inhabiting it as “like the interior sounds that a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work” (172). Most of the story takes place in the house, except for the portion of the novel that is set in the past. There is something in the feminine nature of the home and the three women that inhabit 124 that keeps visitors away. The haunting of 124 by an act of motherly love, love that is “too thick”, keeps the world at bay (165). Only Paul D, a charming man, can reconcile this coven to the outside community. Denver is reluctant to welcome Paul D into 124 but she is grateful that his presence makes “the stares of other Negroes kind, gentle, something Denver did not remember seeing in their faces” (48). Beloved is a story of slavery but it is also the story of strong women who take as much as they

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