The Narrator and the Crapulent Major’s Complicated Relationship

The relationship between The unnamed narrator and The crapulent major is built from unlikely intimacy: in Saigon, the major is a colleague, intelligence analyst, and guide to Chinese food; in California, he is a struggling refugee whose appetite and jokes invite the narrator’s affection. That familiarity does not protect him. The unnamed narrator helps turn suspicion into a case against him, and later participates in his killing. The major’s death leaves the narrator unable to separate political duty from personal responsibility, or the man he loved and pitied from the man he had helped condemn.

Saigon: Colleague, Source, and Companion

In Saigon, The crapulent major worked in the Special Branch analyzing Chinese-language communications and tracking the clandestine activity of Cholon. The National Liberation Front had established an underground network there for political agitation, terrorist organizing, and black-market smuggling. The major’s work made him useful to The unnamed narrator, but their association extended beyond intelligence. He was also the narrator’s trusted guide to food, from elaborate wedding banquets to street carts and vendors carrying their wares on shoulder yokes. Their shared knowledge of the city’s eating places gave the professional relationship a quotidian, companionable dimension.

That familiarity complicates the narrator’s later suspicion. When the possibility arises that the major might be an informant, the narrator finds it difficult to believe: the major had shown no particular talent for deception, covert maneuvering, or political intrigue. The narrator considers a different explanation, that The General’s conspiratorial instincts had combined with American paranoia, with the narrator himself helping to reinforce the suspicion. This uncertainty matters because the narrator does not describe the major as a clear-cut adversary. He knows the man well enough to doubt the accusation, yet remains within a system that can convert doubt into danger.

The Cholon Raid and the Money

An earlier operation in Cholon shows how the two men could work together while occupying morally compromised positions. Acting on a dossier compiled by The crapulent major, their police units raided a rice-wine merchant’s premises. Behind a concealed door, officers found a gambling operation, and the raid ended with the major, The unnamed narrator, and the suspected tax collector left at the scene. The narrator had secretly tipped off Man and expected the suspect to be absent, so the man’s presence overturned the narrator’s expectation without ending the operation.

The suspect was beaten at the interrogation center for a week. The men who interrogated him eventually concluded that he was not a National Liberation Front operative, and his wife’s substantial bribe to the major supplied the decisive proof. The major cheerfully handed the narrator a share equivalent to a year’s salary, although the narrator notes that it would not have been enough to live on for a year. Refusing it might have aroused suspicion, so he accepted the money and then gave it to Man for the revolution. The episode binds the narrator and major through shared corruption even as it separates their loyalties: the major profits from the bribe, while the narrator tries to redirect his own share toward the cause.

The narrator’s later judgment of the major is neither absolution nor simple condemnation. He considers that the man may have committed worse acts than extortion, but concludes that even such conduct would make him average rather than exceptional in corruption. The major is therefore not presented as innocent in every respect. Yet his ordinary, compromised character makes the narrator’s later treatment of him harder to justify as the punishment of an extraordinary villain.

Exile and the Return of Familiarity

In California, The unnamed narrator and The crapulent major meet over breakfast at a noodle shop in Monterey Park. The meal recalls their shared Saigon knowledge but takes place amid the material pressures of exile. The major works as a gas-station attendant, paid in cash so that he can qualify for welfare benefits; his wife sews in a sweatshop and has strained her eyesight through close work. He tells the narrator that she blames him for their poverty and for having children they cannot afford to feed. Twins, conceived in a camp, have recently been born.

The major describes naming them Spinach and Broccoli after panicking when a nurse asked for American names. His explanation turns food, which had once been a pleasure and a shared expertise, into a small act of anxious hope: he wants his children to be strong and healthy in a country he considers unforgiving to the weak or the fat. He also makes the narrator laugh by describing how he used his sweating and his body to elicit pity from a gas-station owner and secure a job. The narrator recognizes the performance—humor and self-deprecation make other people feel sorry for the major—but also feels genuine affection. He gives the major an uneaten cruller, and the major accepts it. Their exchange is tender without hiding the humiliation and economic insecurity that shape the major’s new life.

The Killing and Its Aftermath

That intimacy becomes the setting for violence. Before the encounter, The unnamed narrator and Bon steal license plates and prepare a disguise, hoping to pass as UCLA students. On the evening of the attack, the narrator waits near the major’s carport with a bag containing firecrackers and oranges, presenting it as a Fourth of July gift. Bon approaches with a gun. The major turns toward him while holding the gift bag in one hand and his lunch box in the other; Bon shoots him in the forehead. The bullet and the fall leave the major motionless, while the blood-spotted bag remains in the narrator’s hands. Bon takes the major’s wallet, and the two men escape, later replacing the stolen plates.

The practical aftermath does not erase the personal one. At home, the narrator sees blood on his white sneakers and wipes it away before reporting the killing to The General. Bon empties the wallet onto the table: it contains identification, receipts, a small amount of money, and photographs of the major’s young wife and newborn twins. The narrator orders the photographs burned and plans to dispose of the wallet and other evidence. These objects make the dead man’s domestic life unavoidable, even as the conspirators treat the wallet and plates as evidence to be destroyed. During their drinks and the television coverage of the United States Bicentennial, the narrator remains haunted by the image of the bullet hole as a third eye, which he imagines seeing into him.

Guilt, Innocence, and Political Loyalty

The narrator later confesses to The Commandant that the major’s death troubled him because the major was relatively innocent—the best one could hope for in such a world. The judgment revises neither the major’s earlier bribe-taking nor the narrator’s knowledge of his possible corruption. Instead, it reveals the narrator’s inability to make those facts settle the question of whether killing him was justified. He remembers seeking counsel from Man in Saigon after another intelligence operation and hearing that revolutionaries could never be innocent because they knew too much and had done too much. The remembered answer gives political language to the narrator’s guilt, but it does not quiet it.

The relationship’s final shape is thus a conflict between practiced suspicion and lived recognition. The unnamed narrator can regard The crapulent major as a compromised official, a possible informant, a source of intelligence, a companion in the search for food, and a refugee making jokes about his own hardship. None of those versions cancels the others. The major’s killing turns the narrator’s political reasoning back upon the ordinary details that had made the man familiar: the cruller, the twins’ photographs, the lunch box, and the gift bag. What remains is not a clean verdict on the major but the narrator’s burden of having helped transform an intimate, flawed person into an enemy who could be killed.