Cultural "authenticity"
Born to a Vietnamese mother and a French father, the narrator does not feel that he truly belongs in Vietnam. Additionally, his entire life consists of lying about his true alliances as a spy. However, he is the one Vietnamese person hired by a big Hollywood movie director to help him portray Vietnamese people more authentically in his Vietnam War film.
Searching for the communist spy
The one person the General trusts to find and assassinate the communist spy among their ranks in America is the narrator. Still, the narrator is the spy he is looking for all along. In soliciting the narrator to kill alleged spies, he is truly encouraging a communist spy to kill his own loyal men.
The fruitlessness of the war
The communist revolutionaries fight tirelessly to free their people from their oppressors, but the novel ends with them oppressing Vietnamese society and many citizens locked in prisons or doing forced labor. The army generals who flee Vietnam with the narrator are willing to abandon their own people for their families' safety and better lives in the United States. After a few years in the United States, though, they are so miserable with their lives as immigrants that they are willing to sacrifice they lives to return to Vietnam and fight for their people once the battle has already been lost.
Using his own weapons against him
The narrator is trained in CIA torture methods while serving as a spy in the Vietnamese army, and he shares those secrets with the communist forces. By the end of the novel, those very torture methods are used against him by those he tried to help because they feel he has been corrupted by his time in the west.
Irony of war and theater
The narrator is physically unharmed by the Vietnam War. When he travels to the Philippines, however, to assist with the production of the Vietnam War film, he is nearly killed in an explosion manufactured for the faux war. The movie director argues that this theatrical portrayal of the war is more real than the war itself, as the portrayal that will live on more distinctly in the public memory.
