Alienation in Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (مقاله علمی وزارت علوم)

چکیده

Challenging the postcolonial studies focus on trauma, memory, and identity, this study instead draws on the concept of alienation in Marxist theory to analyze the ideological transformations of four representative soldiers in Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name (1995) and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015). This paper examines the different forms of alienation experienced by selected soldiers within the context of North Vietnamese society and its military system. It aims to analyze how these experiences of alienation influence their decisions and actions, and how the soldiers respond to the oppression that caused the alienation. Using a structural analogy method, the paper applies Marx’s four aspects of alienation—the product of labor, the process of labor, others, and self—within the socio-political context during the Vietnam War and its aftermath. This study finds that those loyal, patriotic, and innocent Vietnamese soldiers, driven by a sincere desire to rebuild their state, were exploited by the political ambitions of Viet Cong leaders and shaped by the long-term indoctrination of Vietnamese communist ideology, which led to their gradual alienation from their ideology. By highlighting ideological alienation rather than trauma or memory, this research offers a new critical lens on communist military narratives and expands Marxist literary criticism within postcolonial studies.