What Is to Be Done

“What Is to Be Done?” is both a borrowed political catchphrase and a measure of the General’s changing capacity to act. First used to display his fluency in the enemy’s thinking, it returns in April 1975 as the South Vietnamese regime’s military position collapses and the General can no longer find a response.

A borrowed question

The General’s favored formulation begins with Lenin, whom the narrator identifies as the figure who took the question and made it his own. The narrator supplies a complication: Nikolay Chernyshevsky had actually introduced the question in a novel of the same title. Correcting the General would have seemed irrelevant. In this account, the phrase reaches him already layered with borrowed authorship: Chernyshevsky originates it, Lenin turns it into a call associated with action, and the General adopts Lenin’s version.

The General uses the question as a set piece. He raps the table with his knuckles and addresses his listeners as “Gentlemen,” making the line sound like a prompt for a decision rather than an abstract problem. Its force comes less from original thought than from the authority attached to Lenin: the General’s performance lets him demonstrate familiarity with an adversary’s ideas without having read the political works his aide summarizes for him.

From command to impasse

The phrase’s earlier confidence sharpens its later reversal. In April 1975, after the northern front has collapsed and defeat has spread, the narrator describes the General as a man who had always found something to do but now could no longer do so. He becomes insomniac and wanders the villa; when he brings the narrator reports of fresh disasters, their recurring response is disbelief. Against this background, the question of what should be done is no longer a rhetorical display. It names a real need for action at the moment when the General cannot supply one.

The narrator’s covert work adds a divided edge to these exchanges: he photographs reports for Man, his handler, even as he feels sympathy for civilians caught in the military retreat. The General’s question thus belongs to two conflicting accounts of the crisis. For him it marks the loss of a once-reliable command posture; for the narrator, the reports behind it are also intelligence and evidence of the regime’s erosion.

The phrase’s narrative significance

The question’s changing function is the point of its recurrence. In the General’s customary performance, it makes borrowed language sound like mastery: Lenin’s apparent authorship gives the General a ready-made idiom of decision. In the April crisis, that same idiom exposes the gap between declaring a problem and being able to change its course. The expression moves from a confident prompt at the table to an unanswered practical dilemma, while its layered origins quietly mirror the characters’ dependence on inherited political language.