“Ethics is Optics”: Paul Ricoeur and Telling Otherwise in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees

Viet Thanh Nguyen has said of Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting that it is "one of the most incredible books I have ever read." However, there has been no extended exploration of the philosopher's influence on the author's work. We attend to this gap in Nguyen scholarship. We argue that Nguyen's stories, in The Refugees, supplement the broadly collective political concerns that animate his nonfiction (notably Nothing Ever Dies) and that his critical and creative work draws much from Ricoeur's ethics. Both writers advocate the necessity of rethinking the past and "telling otherwise." Ricoeur's guiding concept is re-narration. For Nguyen, re-narration involves perceiving anew, in the dual senses of thinking and seeing. He urges the need to look at people and events from the past in new ways, with a "doubled ethical memory" that recalls the "subjugated, the different, … and the forgotten," and opens to the possibility of extending forgiveness, even to "the enemy." Nguyen concretizes Ricoeur's abstract thought in his focus on the Vietnam War and Vietnamese refugee subjectivities and expands on the philosopher's ethical claims in his emphasis on optics and double vision. Two of Nguyen's short stories are considered in detail: "I'd Love You to Want Me" and "The Americans."