Beyond the Archetype: Agency, Trauma, and Institutional Betrayal in the Narrative of Kagusthan Ariaratnam
Aritra Banerjee July 30, 2025
The landscape of popular culture is populated by enduring archetypes—figures who, through repeated narrative deployment, become symbolic shorthand for complex human experiences. Among the most potent of these are the “child soldier” and the “double agent.” The former often embodies the ultimate loss of innocence, a symbol of war’s depravity; the latter represents the ultimate test of loyalty, a figure of intrigue and moral ambiguity. While these fictional constructs serve powerful narrative functions, they often flatten the intricate, painful, and politically charged realities they claim to represent. This report posits that the lived experience of Kagusthan Ariaratnam, as detailed in his memoir Spy Tiger: The 05 File and corroborated by extensive journalistic and legal documentation, serves as a critical and necessary corrective to these well-worn tropes.1
This report will argue that Ariaratnam’s personal narrative does not merely present a variation on these archetypes but actively deconstructs their foundational premises. His story—of forced conscription into the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), of a perilous existence as an informant for multiple state intelligence agencies, and of a subsequent life in Canada marked by psychological trauma and institutional betrayal—challenges the simplistic binaries of victim and perpetrator, hero and traitor, war and peace. By tracing his journey from the battlefields of Sri Lanka to the courtrooms of Canada, his narrative forces a radical re-evaluation of agency under duress, the continuum of exploitation by state and non-state actors, and the enduring nature of conflict, which for many, extends into the very institutions that promise refuge and security.
Employing a comparative textual analysis, this report will place Ariaratnam’s documented life in direct dialogue with critical scholarship on the literary and media portrayals of these conflict archetypes. The analysis will proceed in three parts. Part I will establish the dominant features of the fictional child soldier and double agent, outlining how they are constructed and the ideological work they perform. Part II will offer a detailed account of Ariaratnam’s reality, focusing on the coercive, traumatic, and politically complex nature of his experiences. Finally, Part III will synthesize these threads, demonstrating precisely where and how his lived experience disrupts fictional conventions, ultimately arguing that his ongoing fight for narrative control represents a final, crucial form of agency. Ariaratnam’s story is not just a memoir; it is an intervention, demanding a more nuanced and ethically responsible engagement with the human consequences of war and espionage.
Part I: The Fictional Construct – Archetypes of Conflict
Chapter 1: The Child Soldier as Cultural Symbol
To understand the radical challenge posed by Kagusthan Ariaratnam’s reality, one must first map the fictional territory he inhabits. The figure of the child soldier in literature and media is not a monolithic entity but a multifaceted symbol, deployed to serve a range of narrative, emotional, and ideological functions. These portrayals, while varied, tend to coalesce around a few dominant, often contradictory, archetypes that simplify the lived experience of children in conflict for mass consumption. An examination of these constructs reveals a pattern of moral and political containment, creating a figure that is legible and emotionally resonant but ultimately detached from the complex realities of recruitment, agency, and post-conflict life.
The Victim/Savage Dichotomy
The most prevalent framework for representing child soldiers, particularly in news media and realistic drama, is a stark dichotomy that casts them as either pitiable victims or monstrous savages.4 This binary serves to evoke strong, uncomplicated emotional responses from the audience. On one hand, the image of a child with an AK-47 is presented as the ultimate symbol of innocence lost, a fundraising tool for humanitarian organizations, and a shorthand for the “barbarism” of distant conflicts.6 This portrayal, exemplified by the narrative established in memoirs like Ishmael Beah’s
A Long Way Gone, presents a child who is kidnapped, drugged, brainwashed, and forced to commit atrocities until rescued by a benevolent external force, often a Western-led NGO.6 This framing constructs a “helpless victim” who is an object of sympathy and whose plight depoliticizes the conflict, transforming it from a complex geopolitical struggle into a humanitarian crisis demanding charity or intervention.6
On the other hand, child soldiers are often depicted as “demons,” “black sheep,” or “dangerous” perpetrators, embodying a terrifying perversion of childhood.5 This creates an ambiguous figure who is both “dangerous but helpless,” a paradox that captures public fascination but obscures the nuanced reality.5 These portrayals are frequently tied to orientalist tropes, using the child soldier as a means of representing non-Western societies, particularly in Africa and Asia, as “savage or underdeveloped”.7 This framing effectively undermines the complex political, economic, and social factors that lead to the use of child soldiers, instead attributing it to a generalized, regional brutality. By freezing the child soldier into these two static roles—the pure victim or the irredeemable savage—media representations create a figure that is easily consumed but fundamentally misunderstood.
The Sanitized Hero: Genre and Moral Disengagement
The context and tone of a narrative fundamentally alter the portrayal of youth in combat.8 While realistic fiction treats the concept as a horror, a significant portion of popular culture, especially within the fantasy, science fiction, and young adult (YAL) genres, reimagines the child soldier as a hero.9 In worlds safely removed from contemporary geopolitics, from the wizarding war of Harry Potter to the dystopian arenas of The Hunger Games and the strategic battles of Ender’s Game, young protagonists take up arms against tyrannical adults and evil regimes.6
These narratives are not intended to reflect real-world ethical concerns; their primary goal is to inspire and entertain.8 The focus shifts from the grim realities of war to themes of adventure, teamwork, personal growth, and heroism.8 The violence is stylized, and the psychological trauma, moral injury, and long-term consequences of combat are significantly downplayed or ignored entirely.6 In these fictional “just war” scenarios, the audience is not prompted to question the morality of children fighting because the narrative frames their participation as a necessity for the triumph of good over evil.6 The child warrior becomes a symbol of hope and resilience, an empowering figure for a younger audience. This sanitization allows for an engagement with the theme of youth in conflict without the “weighty moral implications” that accompany real-world child soldiers.8 The result is a moral and psychological disengagement, where the child soldier is celebrated as a “fun, cool concept” rather than recognized as a tragedy.8 Both the tragic victim of realism and the sanitized hero of fantasy serve to contain the deeply unsettling truths of the child soldier’s experience, rendering it safe for consumption by bracketing either its political complexity or its moral horror.
The Narrative Function of the Child’s Gaze
Beyond their symbolic roles, child soldiers in literature often serve a specific narrative function as privileged observers of war’s chaos.10Literary theorists have noted that the child’s perspective is often employed as a device to narrate “unspeakable horrors” from a position of supposed innocence.10 The child is seen as being “closer to affect than to language,” providing a more direct, emotionally authentic, though imperfect, account of war trauma than a self-aware adult narrator could.10 This perspective is not intended to be a literal representation of reality but an “imaginary position” used for various literary effects: allegory, pathos, satire, or idealization.10
This narrative strategy allows writers to explore the rupturing effects of war on society and memory. The child’s viewpoint can “remobilize civic memory,” introducing a more pluralistic set of war experiences into the public consciousness and unearthing buried traumas.10 The child narrator, often lacking a fully formed moral compass, can present events without the filtering and justification of an adult, thereby exposing the incongruity of adult rationales for war.10 However, this very utility highlights the constructed nature of the portrayal. The child soldier becomes a vehicle for the author’s message, a lens through which to critique the adult world, rather than a subject whose own complex interiority and agency are the primary focus.
The Neglected Aftermath: Reintegration in Fiction
Perhaps the most significant elision in fictional portrayals is the aftermath of conflict. The complex, arduous, and often lifelong process of reintegration for former child soldiers is frequently handled superficially or ignored altogether.7 Research comparing Hollywood films and documentaries reveals a telling disparity: fictional films are more likely to focus on short-term reintegration, offering neat, cathartic resolutions, whereas documentaries tend to explore the more challenging long-term struggles.11
The deep psychological consequences, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and aggression, are often downplayed.7 The unique and severe challenges faced by female child soldiers, who frequently experience sexual violence and are ostracized upon return to their communities, are rarely represented with accuracy in mainstream fiction.7 The economic hardships and social stigma that prevent former child soldiers from continuing their education or finding stable employment are also largely absent from these narratives.7 By concluding the story with the rescue or the end of the war, popular fiction avoids the uncomfortable and unresolved realities of the post-conflict phase. This narrative choice reinforces a simplistic arc of suffering followed by salvation, failing to address the ways in which the war continues to shape the lives of its youngest participants long after the fighting has stopped. This failure to depict the aftermath is a failure to represent the true cost of war, a cost that Kagusthan Ariaratnam’s story illustrates with devastating clarity.
Chapter 2: The Double Agent as a Trope of Duality and Deceit
The double agent is a cornerstone of espionage fiction, a character archetype defined by a fundamental duality that generates immense narrative tension. Living a life of performance, the double agent navigates a treacherous world of lies, paranoia, and shifting allegiances.12 From the early, psychologically complex spies of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene to the cold warriors of John le Carré, the archetype has evolved, yet its core function has remained remarkably consistent.13 The fictional double agent is less a realistic portrayal of an intelligence operative and more a literary device used to explore themes of loyalty, betrayal, identity, and the moral compromises inherent in the defense of the state.
The Core Conflict: Performance and Paranoia
At the heart of the double agent narrative is the immense psychological strain of serving two masters.12 This is a character who can “never leave the stage,” constantly performing a role for one side while harboring a secret allegiance to another.12 This existence is marked by perpetual paranoia, the constant fear of being discovered, which often leads to a “bullet in the back of the head”.12 Authors like le Carré and Greene excel at depicting these “nuanced, fallible humans,” individuals often caught in traps of their own making, whose public and private lives are in constant, corrosive conflict.13
This internal turmoil is the dramatic engine of the genre. The narrative often focuses on the “theatricality” of creating a double, as seen in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, where Alec Leamas must meticulously construct a persona as a disillusioned, embittered defector to be convincing to his enemies.12 This performance is all-consuming, and as many fictional accounts suggest, it can lead to a loss of self. The lines between the cover identity and the true self blur, leaving the agent adrift in a sea of moral and psychological ambiguity. The central question for the reader, and often for the other characters, becomes “Which side is she really on?” 13, a question that presupposes a true loyalty exists to be discovered.
A Typology of Motivations
To make the act of betrayal comprehensible to the audience, spy fiction typically relies on a limited and well-defined set of motivations. These motivations frame the agent’s duplicity within recognizable human desires or pressures, providing a clear rationale for their actions.
Ideology: The most classic motivation is a sincere belief in a political or philosophical cause that supersedes national loyalty. The archetype for this is the real-life Cambridge Five spy Kim Philby, whose conviction in communism led him to betray Britain for the Soviet Union.15 Fictional characters modeled on this type, such as Bill Haydon in le Carré’sTinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, are often portrayed as the most dangerous because their betrayal is rooted in principle, not weakness.13
Coercion/Blackmail: Another common trope is the reluctant traitor, an individual forced into espionage through threats against their life or the lives of their loved ones.15 Vesper Lynd in Ian Fleming’sCasino Royale is a prime example. Blackmailed by a hostile intelligence service that holds her lover captive, she is a tragic figure whose betrayal is born of duress, not malice.12 This motivation allows the character to remain sympathetic, a victim of circumstance rather than a true villain.
Financial Gain/Opportunism: The cynical agent motivated by greed is a staple of the genre. This character views espionage as a business and their loyalty is for sale to the highest bidder. Interestingly, while this is a common fictional trope, the real-life story of Eddie Chapman, a professional criminal who became a double agent for opportunistic reasons, suggests that such figures may fare better than their fictional counterparts, who are often punished for their lack of principle.12
This typology, while effective for storytelling, simplifies the complex and often messy reasons individuals become informants or collaborators in the real world. It provides clear, dramatic stakes but rarely accounts for the kind of pragmatic, moment-to-moment survival calculus that drives individuals in chaotic conflict zones. The entire framework of the double agent narrative is built upon a test of loyalty to a larger entity—a nation, an ideology, or a cause. The character’s choices are defined by their relationship to these powerful state or quasi-state actors, reinforcing the primacy of the established political order. The narrative implicitly asks whose side the agent is on, assuming that allegiance must be owed to one of the competing powers, a premise that Kagusthan Ariaratnam’s story fundamentally questions.
The Narrative Arc of Betrayal and Doom
Spy fiction, for the most part, is a morally conservative genre. Betrayal is a transgression that must ultimately be punished, and the narrative arc of the double agent typically ends in tragedy.12 As one analysis notes, “the lot of the double agent is rarely a happy one,” and they seldom “ride off into the sunset”.12 Vesper Lynd takes her own life, crushed by the stress of her dual role.12 Alec Leamas is gunned down at the Berlin Wall, a pawn sacrificed in a cynical game far larger than himself.12 The discovery of the “mole”—a term popularized by le Carré to describe a long-term sleeper agent who has burrowed deep into an organization—and their subsequent downfall is the classic resolution of the subgenre.13
This narrative convention serves a powerful ideological function. It reinforces the idea that loyalty is paramount and that treason, no matter how well-intentioned or coerced, leads to ruin. It provides a sense of moral closure and restores the order that the double agent’s existence threatened. The story becomes a puzzle for the protagonist (and the reader) to solve, and the double agent is the final, missing piece. Once they are identified and neutralized, the story can end.
The Absence of the Mundane and the Long-Term
The focus of spy fiction is almost exclusively on the high-stakes “game” of espionage—the clandestine meetings, the dead drops, the thrilling escapes, and the dramatic betrayals. What is conspicuously absent is the aftermath. The genre rarely explores the long-term, bureaucratic, or psychological fallout of a life lived under such extreme pressure. The post-espionage life of an agent, particularly one who must grapple with profound trauma, debilitating mental illness, or the mundane struggle for economic survival, is not part of the narrative.
There is no room in the thrilling world of fictional espionage for the story of an agent fighting for disability benefits, battling a state bureaucracy that has discarded them, or facing discrimination because of the very psychological scars incurred in service. The story ends when the mission is over or the traitor is exposed. This elision is critical because it preserves the glamour and excitement of the genre. To follow the agent into a life of quiet desperation or protracted legal struggle would be to admit that the true costs of espionage are not just dramatic death but also slow, grinding, and bureaucratic erasure. It is precisely in this neglected narrative space—the unending, post-conflict struggle—that Kagusthan Ariaratnam’s story begins its most profound departure from the fictional archetype.
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Part II: The Lived Experience – A Case Study of Kagusthan Ariaratnam
Chapter 3: The Reality of Conscription and Coerced Agency
The journey of Kagusthan Ariaratnam into the world of armed conflict and intelligence operations did not begin with a heroic choice or a cynical calculation, but with an act of brutal, indiscriminate force. His experience strips away the romanticism and simplified morality of fictional narratives, revealing a world where choice is an illusion and agency is a desperate strategy for survival within an inescapable system of violence. His story forces a re-examination of what it means to make a decision when all options are circumscribed by the threat of death.
The Abduction: A Choice Without Choice
In 1991, Kagusthan Ariaratnam was not a disaffected youth seeking a cause or a thrill-seeker looking for adventure. He was an Advanced Level mathematics student at Kokkuvil Hindu College in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, with dreams for his future.17 His life was irrevocably altered when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a brutal separatist group, raided his school and forcibly conscripted him along with 18 of his classmates.17 This was not a random act but a systematic policy. The LTTE mandated that the eldest child of each Tamil family join their ranks, and as the first-born son, Ariaratnam was a designated target.17 His family’s protests against the conscription policy were futile.17
The initial phase of his captivity involved forced labor, digging trenches and supplying the front lines, under the false promise that the students would be returned to their school when the work was done.17 This pretense was shattered by a Sri Lankan Air Force attack on their camp. The white shirts of their school uniforms made them conspicuous targets, and the ensuing battle was a massacre. Many LTTE commanders and some of Ariaratnam’s school friends were killed.17 In the aftermath, the surviving students were not treated with sympathy but with suspicion and brutality by enraged LTTE cadres. They were beaten severely and then thrown into a dark, underground bunker for five days.17
It was in this subterranean prison that the true nature of their “choice” was revealed. LTTE underlings presented them with a stark ultimatum: join the organization or remain in the bunker to starve to death.17 This was compounded by relentless psychological pressure; for every day they refused, the cadres threatened to go to their homes and take a younger sibling in their place.17 Faced with certain death by starvation and the threat to their families, Ariaratnam and his fellow students “had no real choice but to join”.17 This was not the abstract coercion of a fictional blackmail plot, where a distant loved one is threatened. This was immediate, existential duress, a decision made in darkness, under threat of violence, starvation, and familial retribution. The concept of voluntary enlistment, whether heroic or misguided, is rendered meaningless in the face of such overwhelming force.
From Conscript to Operative: Survival as Skill
Once inside the LTTE, Ariaratnam’s path was not one of ideological conversion but of pragmatic adaptation. His memoir notes that his “sharp intellect and adaptability” were recognized by the LTTE leadership, which led to his placement within the group’s elite naval intelligence wing.2 This was not a heroic rise through the ranks born of conviction. It was a survival strategy. Excelling in a specialized, non-combat role was a way to navigate the violent environment of the organization, to make oneself useful, and perhaps to avoid the fate of being disposable cannon fodder on the front lines. His intelligence work was a skill deployed in the service of staying alive in a system he had been forced into. This complicates the fictional narrative of the brainwashed, unthinking child soldier. Ariaratnam was thinking constantly—not about the Tamil cause, but about how to survive the next day, the next week, the next battle.
This reality introduces a crucial concept largely absent from fictional portrayals: coerced agency. While the initial act of joining the LTTE was entirely non-consensual, his subsequent actions within the group were a series of calculated decisions. He was a victim of circumstance who nonetheless had to act as an agent to navigate those circumstances. His choices were real and had consequences, but the menu of options was brutally limited by the violent power structure that enveloped him. This nuanced position—simultaneously a victim of coercion and an active agent in his own survival—defies the simple binaries of the helpless victim or the willing perpetrator that dominate popular representations.
The Turn: Defection as a Survival Strategy
Ariaratnam’s “growing disillusionment” with the LTTE eventually led him to make another perilous choice: to become an informant.18 This was not a clean ideological break or a dramatic conversion to the other side, as is often portrayed in spy fiction. It was a continuation of his survival strategy, an attempt to find a new path out of an impossible situation. He began working as a spy for India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and later collaborated with Sri Lankan military intelligence, effectively becoming a double agent.2
This act of defection was not a single, clean event but a “perilous turn” that plunged him into an even more dangerous game.2 He was now maneuvering between multiple hostile and competing forces, each with its own agenda. His loyalty was not to India or to the Sri Lankan government, just as it had not truly been to the LTTE. His loyalty was to his own survival. This reframes the entire concept of the double agent. In fiction, the double agent’s duplicity is a moral or ideological drama centered on betraying a nation or a cause. For Ariaratnam, it was the amoral, pragmatic calculus of a man trapped between warring factions, using the only currency he had—information—to try and secure his own life. His story demonstrates that in the grey zones of real-world conflict, the grand narratives of patriotism and treason often collapse into the singular, desperate pursuit of staying alive.
Chapter 4: The Unending War – Post-Conflict Trauma and State Betrayal
For many characters in fiction, the end of the war or the completion of a mission marks the end of their story. They are rescued, they find peace, or they die a tragic, meaningful death. Kagusthan Ariaratnam’s narrative radically departs from this convention by demonstrating that for a survivor of profound trauma, the conflict never truly ends. It simply changes form, shifting from the physical battlefield to the internal landscape of the mind and the bureaucratic battlegrounds of the very states that promise sanctuary. His life in Canada reveals a harrowing post-conflict reality where the trauma of the past is not only unresolved but is actively weaponized by the institutions of his new home.
The Scars of War and Betrayal
The five years Ariaratnam spent with the LTTE, from July 1990 to June 1995, left him with deep and lasting psychological wounds.3 His subsequent experiences only compounded this trauma. After defecting, he was held by Sri Lankan forces and allegedly coerced into becoming an informant for Rohan Gunaratna, a prominent counter-terrorism academic who was then a Master’s student.19 Ariaratnam claims that over the next decade, Gunaratna exploited him as a source, translator, and ghostwriter, using “emotional blackmail” and threats against his family in Sri Lanka to maintain control.19
The immense pressure of this exploitation, combined with his wartime experiences, took a severe toll on his mental health. In 2001, he was diagnosed with clinical depression, and in 2003, with paranoid psychosis.19He describes these conditions not as “scars of war” but as “scars of betrayal,” a direct result of the psychological abuse he endured.19 This suffering is further complicated by a profound and disturbing allegation: that the mental illness he suffered after coming to Canada was “orchestrated or caused by CSIS,” the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.20 This accusation fundamentally reframes the role of the state. In Ariaratnam’s narrative, the state is not a neutral party, a rescuer, or a provider of care, but an active participant and potential cause of his ongoing suffering.
The Canadian Context: From Informant to “Threat”
Upon arriving in Canada, Ariaratnam’s relationship with the state was initially one of cooperation. For several years in the 2000s, he served as an informant for CSIS, providing the agency with valuable intelligence regarding the Tamil Tigers, the very organization that had abducted him as a teenager.20 He was, by his account, a willing partner, sharing what he knew with the authorities of his adopted country. He felt betrayed when this history of cooperation was seemingly turned against him.20
The pivotal moment of betrayal came in 2016. Ariaratnam, then working for a private security firm in Ottawa, applied for a position with the Parliamentary Protective Service, a job that would have been a life-changing opportunity, offering a significant pay increase and stability.20The position required a “site access clearance,” which necessitated a security screening by CSIS.20 His application was rejected on security grounds following a meeting between CSIS and House of Commons officials.20 During this meeting, CSIS disclosed two classified documents from 2006 and 2009—drafted in connection with his immigration process—that discussed his mental health.20
The disclosure was a devastating blow. “I felt betrayed, basically backstabbed me,” Ariaratnam stated. “I gave them a lot of information”.20The institutional response was telling. While CSIS later acknowledged in a hearing that “senior management at the spy agency would not have approved the disclosure of the classified documents” in the manner they were shared, they simultaneously maintained that they “had the authority to share the information” and that it was “relevant”.20 This bureaucratic doublespeak reveals an institution willing to admit a procedural error while defending the substance of its actions, demonstrating a casual disregard for Ariaratnam’s privacy, his well-being, and the implicit contract of trust between an informant and an agency. The very trauma he carried was used by a state agency to portray him as a security threat, effectively punishing him for the injuries he had sustained.
The Legal Battle: A New Front Line
Faced with this institutional betrayal, Ariaratnam embarked on a new kind of war—a protracted legal battle against the Canadian state apparatus. His initial complaints to CSIS itself, to the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA), and to the Canadian Human Rights Commission were all dismissed, leaving him with no recourse.20 NSIRA, the intelligence watchdog, ruled against him on the technicality that it was the House of Commons, not CSIS, that had ultimately rejected his job application.20 The Human Rights Commission dismissed his complaint on the grounds that the matter had already been dealt with by NSIRA.21
It was only through a successful appeal to the Federal Court that he achieved a partial victory. Federal Court Justice Janet Fuhrer ordered the Human Rights Commission to re-examine his case, finding the commission’s reasoning for dismissal to be “unreasonable,” “incoherent,” and “unintelligible”.20 The court noted that the commission had wrongly equated his NSIRA complaint (which did not raise human rights issues) with his discrimination complaint to them.21 This legal victory, while significant, did not resolve his case but merely sent it back into the bureaucratic maze for reconsideration.
This ongoing legal struggle represents the current front line of Ariaratnam’s conflict. It is a war fought not with guns but with filings, hearings, and appeals. The cost has been immense, not just in legal fees but in personal and economic terms. He states that the denial of the Parliament Hill job was “economically depriving” and that the stress of the situation contributed to the breakdown of his marriage.20 This narrative of a post-conflict life consumed by a draining, bureaucratic war against a seemingly indifferent state stands in stark contrast to the clean resolutions of fiction. It inverts the traditional rescue narrative, casting the state of refuge not as a savior but as a new and formidable antagonist, a perpetuator of the very trauma it should be helping to heal.
Part III: Analysis – Where Reality Disrupts Fiction
Chapter 5: Collapsing the Binaries – Agency in the Grey Zone
The life of Kagusthan Ariaratnam, when placed in dialogue with the fictional archetypes of the child soldier and the double agent, does not simply offer a more “realistic” version of these figures. Instead, it functions as a powerful deconstruction, collapsing the neat binaries and moral certainties upon which these fictional constructs depend. His narrative unfolds in the “grey, ambiguous and paradoxical zones” that media portrayals so often elide.5 By examining his journey through the lenses of agency, motivation, and loyalty, it becomes clear that the tidy categories of victim/perpetrator and hero/traitor are utterly insufficient to capture the complexity of a life lived in the crucible of conflict and its aftermath.
Beyond Victim/Perpetrator
The dominant media portrayal of the child soldier oscillates between the helpless victim and the monstrous perpetrator.4 Ariaratnam’s experience obliterates this dichotomy. He was unequivocally a victim, abducted from his school at 17 and forced into the LTTE under the direct threat of death.17In this, his story aligns with the “forcible recruitment” narrative. However, once inside the organization, he was not a passive, brainwashed pawn. He became an active participant, using his intellect to rise within the naval intelligence wing.2 This was an act of agency, but it was a form of “coerced agency”—choices made within a framework where non-participation meant death or punishment. He was simultaneously a victim of the system and an agent operating within it. This reality, where one can be both a victim of forced conscription and a functional part of the machine of violence, resists easy categorization and challenges the audience’s desire for moral clarity.
Beyond Hero/Traitor
Similarly, the archetype of the double agent is built around a central moral drama of loyalty and betrayal, typically to a nation or an ideology.13 The agent is either a hero serving a higher cause in secret or a traitor betraying their country for principle, greed, or under duress. Ariaratnam’s work as an informant for Indian (RAW) and Sri Lankan intelligence while still embedded within the LTTE fits the technical definition of a double agent, but it strips the role of its grand ideological stakes.2
His motivation was not allegiance to a new flag or a sudden conversion to the cause of his former enemies. It was a raw and pragmatic “survival instinct”.2 His duplicity was not a moral test of patriotism but an amoral calculus of survival. He was not choosing between two sides in a geopolitical contest; he was navigating a minefield of multiple, equally dangerous powers to find a path to safety. This replaces the central question of spy fiction—”Whose side is he on?”—with a much more elemental one: “How will he stay alive?” By doing so, his narrative reveals the fictional trope of the double agent as a luxury of stable statehood, a drama that can only be staged when the players have the security to contemplate abstract loyalties. For Ariaratnam, loyalty was a concept subordinate to the immediate necessity of survival.
The following table provides a systematic comparison, juxtaposing the common tropes of fiction with the documented realities of Ariaratnam’s life. This direct comparison serves to crystallize the profound divergence between the simplified archetypes of popular culture and the complex, unresolved nature of lived experience. It moves the analysis from abstract critique to a concrete demonstration of how a single, well-documented life can challenge and dismantle entire genres of storytelling.
Chapter 6: The Final Battle – The Fight for Narrative Control
The most profound way in which Kagusthan Ariaratnam’s story challenges fictional conventions lies in its final act—an act that is still being written. Where fictional narratives of war and espionage demand resolution, his life demonstrates that the final battle for a survivor is often the fight for control over their own story. This struggle against institutional erasure, against being defined and dismissed by powerful entities, represents the ultimate form of agency for someone whose life has been shaped by the agendas of others.
The Memoir as Counter-Narrative
The decision to write and publish Spy Tiger: The 05 File is not merely an act of remembrance; it is an act of resistance.1 It is a deliberate move to seize the narrative from the institutions—intelligence agencies, academic experts, and state bureaucracies—that have previously controlled, interpreted, and weaponized his life story for their own purposes.19 The book’s epigraph, a verse from the ancient Tamil text, the Tirukkuṟaḷ, serves as a clear statement of this intent: “Whatever the Matter is being Told, Whoever the Person is Telling, Discern the Truth is Wisdom”.3 This is a direct appeal to the reader to look past the official accounts and the simplified labels, to engage with the messy, contradictory truth of his experience.
This act of authorship is a reclamation of a life that has been objectified. He is refusing to remain a case file in a CSIS archive, a footnote in an academic’s book, or a statistic in a human rights report. By telling his own story, in his own words, he asserts his status as a subject of history, not merely its object. This is a form of agency rarely, if ever, afforded to the archetypal child soldier or double agent, whose stories are almost always told by others and whose fates are sealed by the narrative’s conclusion. Ariaratnam’s fight is to ensure his story is told by him, and that its ending is not imposed by anyone else.
The Unreliable Narrator vs. The Erased Subject
Spy fiction often plays with the trope of the unreliable narrator, a character whose account of events is deliberately skewed, forcing the reader to question what is true. Ariaratnam’s struggle is a real-world inversion of this concept. He is not fighting to deceive, but to be believed. His battle is against being rendered an “unreliable subject” by powerful institutions that have an interest in discrediting him.
The disclosure of his mental health records by CSIS can be seen as a tactic, whether intentional or not, to undermine his credibility.20 By framing him as psychologically unstable, it becomes easier to dismiss his allegations of betrayal and mistreatment. His fight is not just to prove the facts of his case, but to assert his right to be heard as a rational actor despite the profound trauma he has endured—trauma that the state itself is implicated in. He must fight against the circular logic that uses the very injuries inflicted upon him as evidence to invalidate his testimony about those injuries.
The Unresolved Ending
Perhaps the most radical departure from fiction is the unresolved nature of Ariaratnam’s story. Fictional narratives, by their very structure, move towards closure. The war ends, the mole is caught, the hero finds peace, or the victim is laid to rest. Ariaratnam’s life offers no such neat conclusion. His legal battle with the Canadian Human Rights Commission is ongoing.20His struggle for economic stability and personal well-being continues.20 His story is not a closed loop but an open-ended process of survival and resistance.
This lack of resolution is not a narrative flaw; it is the most authentic representation of the long tail of trauma and conflict. It mirrors the reality for countless survivors whose lives are not defined by a single, dramatic arc but by a continuous, attritional struggle. By refusing to offer a simple ending, Ariaratnam’s narrative challenges the very conventions of storytelling, which often provide a catharsis that real life denies. His story is a testament to “the resilience of the human spirit” not because it culminates in a happy ending, but because it demonstrates a relentless, ongoing refusal to be silenced or defined by the forces that have sought to control him.18 This continuous fight is the story.
Conclusion: The Ethical Imperative of Nuance
The personal narrative of Kagusthan Ariaratnam, traced from his forced conscription in Sri Lanka to his ongoing legal battles in Canada, serves as a powerful and essential refutation of the archetypal child soldier and double agent. His lived experience systematically dismantles the simplistic binaries and moral certainties that govern these figures in popular literature and media. Where fiction offers the clear categories of victim or perpetrator, hero or traitor, Ariaratnam’s reality presents a portrait of “coerced agency”—a continuous series of pragmatic, survival-driven choices made within contexts of extreme duress. His story reveals a continuum of exploitation that does not end with his escape from a non-state actor like the LTTE, but extends to his interactions with the intelligence agencies of multiple states, culminating in an alleged betrayal by the very country that offered him refuge. By documenting how his trauma was allegedly weaponized against him by a state institution, his narrative inverts the classic rescue arc and exposes the “post-conflict” phase as a new and insidious form of warfare.
The implications of this deconstruction are significant and extend beyond literary analysis. For creators in media and literature, Ariaratnam’s story issues a profound challenge: to move beyond the ethically convenient and commercially viable tropes that dominate portrayals of conflict. It calls for a commitment to representing the morally ambiguous, politically complex, and often unresolved nature of war and its aftermath. It urges storytellers to abandon the search for catharsis and instead embrace the uncomfortable truths of survival, trauma, and the often-porous line between war and peace.
For policymakers, legal experts, and human rights advocates, his case highlights a critical and dangerous gap in the duty of care that states owe to their human assets. The treatment of informants, particularly those who are refugees with significant trauma histories, requires a far more robust framework of oversight, accountability, and psychological support. Ariaratnam’s struggle with CSIS and the Canadian legal system raises urgent questions about the unchecked power of intelligence agencies, the weaponization of private health information, and the fundamental human rights of those who provide intelligence to the state, often at great personal risk. His experience suggests that without meaningful accountability, state institutions can become perpetuators of the very harm they claim to protect against.
Ultimately, real stories like that of Kagusthan Ariaratnam are more than just “realistic”; they are ethically necessary. They compel a confrontation with the uncomfortable reality that the simple labels we use to make sense of the world are inadequate for the lives they are meant to describe. His narrative, captured in his memoir Spy Tiger, is not a story of triumphant redemption that offers easy closure. It is a testament to an unyielding refusal to be erased, a fight for the right to control one’s own narrative against overwhelming institutional power. It is in this ongoing struggle, not in a fictionalized ending, that the true meaning of resilience is found.
Featured image courtesy of Kagusthan Ariaratnam.
Works cited
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https://projectofive.ca/beyond-the-archetype-agency-trauma-and-institutional-betrayal-in-the-narrative-of-kagusthan-ariaratnam/?fbclid=IwdGRleAPTMDdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEelyRWkaN2d5Hsj-A2ix3fTvmagoqo-YgApHz_gdFrPnmHymTYFXBP4MYaXm0_aem_sGoe_s6txfz_i9AA8_Jrpg
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