Charlie Miller

Charlie Miller

ENGL 1147

Due 12/16/13

Assignment 6 Analysis

The Sympathetic Enemy

            One of the most prominent themes in the spy fiction that we have read is the difference between the motivations of the politicians who start a war and the soldiers that fight it. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, for example, Alec Leamas did not develop such a strong hatred towards Mundt because he felt a deep opposition to the communistic ideology that Mundt stood for. Instead Leamas hates Mundt for his character, for the crimes he had committed, and for killing Karl Reimeck. Similarly, in Our Man in Havana, Jim Wormold strives to kill Carter not because of any political differences but because Carter was responsible for the death of his close friend Dr. Hasselbacher.  Both of these characters chose to act because of a more basic motivation: the belief that their enemies are inherently evil.

            This emotional hatred serves as a much stronger motivation than an ideological difference, and governments have historically used propaganda to take advantage of this fact. The purpose of propaganda is to foster hatred for another people by convincing the public that they are inherently evil and inhumane. These pieces of propaganda are most often gross exaggerations of the truth, if based in truth at all, and the subjects of the pieces are much more humane and similar to the viewer than they are depicted. This is the view that both Wormold and Leamas initially have in their respective novels. Both characters believe that there are great differences between themselves and their enemies, and both later discover how sympathetic and alike their true enemies really are.

            My drawing follows this theme by contrasting two families, one American and one Russian, with their images of each other. On the left hand side, the American family is sitting down eating breakfast and the man is reading the newspaper which is filled with anti-communist propaganda. Based on all of the images he is looking at, he imagines a stereotypical Russian man, which is depicted in his thoughts to be cruel and violent. On the right, a very similar representation is drawn: a Russian family, with a Russian man reading anti-capitalist propaganda and imagining an American as fat and greedy. The drawings of the two imagined characters are highly exaggerated and are depicted to look inhuman. The two families, however, are drawn to be very similar, with only minor differences. This is done in such a manner to show the reality that the two families are very similar. As a further tool to enforce this concept, the Russian family is reversed horizontally, creating the image that the two families are mirror images of each other.

            The left side of the drawing, that of the benign American family thinking of the evils of communists, is representative of the initial beliefs of both Wormold and Leamas. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Leamas initially thinks the enemy that he is sent to remove from power is Mundt. Mundt is an example of all of the qualities expected from an enemy spy; he is ruthless, brutal, and a Nazi as well. This initial case is reflected in the drawing of the American family; Leamas, like the man reading the newspaper, has decided based on what he knows that the enemy is a very evil character. Graham Greene uses a similar situation to show this theme in Our Man in Havana. When Wormold’s closest friend dies, he is driven into a revenge-filled plot to kill Carter, the man responsible for Hasselbacher’s death. He had to frequently remind himself how Hasselbacher looked when Wormold saw him on the floor of the Wonder Bar, and how Carter did not give Hasselbacher a chance. Wormold is trying to set Carter apart from himself, to destroy all sympathy he held for him, so that it was easier to see Carter as the enemy. This is the purpose of the propaganda in the drawing; to create hate for the enemy by depicting him as cruel and evil.

            The second comparison that is made in the drawing serves to show that the two sides are not as different as believed. When Wormold finally came to confront Carter, he saw a different man then he imagined. He learned that Carter was scared of women, nostalgic of home, and perhaps a romantic (Greene 211). Wormold suddenly lost all of his previous motivation, because he thought “with every second the man was becoming human, a creature like oneself whom one might pity or console” (209). In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Le Carré leads Leamas to the same realization near the end of the story: Leamas learns that Mundt, while still being guilty of all of the reasons why Leamas felt hatred for him, is an ally, and Fiedler is the true enemy. Liz describes Fiedler as “good” and “gentle”, and Leamas agrees that Fiedler is a better person than Mundt (Le Carré 207). This is the startling revelation of the end of the novel that is the reverse of what the reader would expect; the more antagonistic and cruel character is Leamas’ ally and the nice character is the one that Leamas kills. As Liz puts it, “Fiedler was kind and decent; … and now you killed him. Mundt is a spy and a traitor and you protect him” (217). Leamas’ enemy is not what he imagined, he is in fact a nice and sympathetic person, nothing like the evil man Leamas imagined him to be. This contrast is represented in the second aspect of the drawing, where the Russian family is compared with the exaggerated and stereotypical being that the Americans expect him to be. The real “enemy” of the American family is very similar to themselves, and is in fact almost a mirror image.

            The process I took with the drawing was a bit different than I had planned in the proposal. I used several stock images and some photo manipulation tools to make a mock-up of my final drawing, and then sketched it. This helped me by giving me a picture of what to draw and made the final drawing look realistic. My greatest difficulty was finding applicable propaganda pieces to sketch and deciding how I would represent what the two men were thinking. I was inspired to create a piece representing this theme because of its continual appearance as a subversive plot device used by the authors. Another inspiration, and the reason that I decided to base it in the reality of the Cold War, is that the false belief that our enemies are inherently evil is still propagated today through biased stories and cultural insensitivity.

Works Cited

Greene, Graham. Our Man in Havana. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Le Carré, John. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. New York: Coward-McCann, 1963.

Influencing Pictures for the Drawing

http://static5.depositphotos.com/1006214/470/i/950/depositphotos_4707882-Middle-Aged-Man-reading-newspaper-with-breakfast.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/South-korean-propaganda-6.jpg

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lpj1hxwdKM1r0kov4o1_500.jpg

http://dailyweighin.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/dailyweighin-family-eating-healthy-breakfast-650x4

http://i0.wp.com/listverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/pg25.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Fb6jk.jpg

http://25.media.tumblr.com/822a782b8a2061bc15e7a8ea7f35a71b/tumblr_mq0224vI4G1salpkbo1_1280.jpg

http://englishrussia.com/images/anti_usa/4.jpg