Perspective
Perspectives can be delivered in many forms and viewed from many lenses. Its a powerful topic in the world today which gives shape to the world of what it is now. Deciding if someone should die or live is perspective, fate is decided by how the person views the circumstances. Someone with an angry and jealous mind will view scenes differently as with a person with a calm and peaceful mind.
For this I will be talking about the book Bourne Trilogy, written by Robert Ludlum. For this book the topics to focus on is sexism, racism , and class. This book is very long, about 1400 pages and covers many areas of which I will explain in this post today.
Viewing this book from a sexism point of view, I should say that through out this whole book females play an incredibly minimal role in this book. All the high positioned generals are males, criminals are males, and the main character himself is a male. There is only one girl in the whole entire book and she turns out to be a very smart and well educated lady with a high status. Why is this so? Does the writer believe that girls don’t play a very important role or that one girl is good enough to complete a story? Whenever the guy has a breakdown or gets a bit lost she is always the one who knows him the best and helps him regain his senses. Does the writer believe that guys can’t comfort as good and that males need a girl or a women to lean against during their weakest moments to be able to see clearly again? Another thing is that all the important generals are males, why can’t woman be the one to run the Medusa [a program]. Girls and males can find this book to be offending to both sexes because it shows how girls can’t do things like politics or government while males don’t have a very emotional side and isn’t very sensitive to others meaning that their not good at comforting people.
Viewing this book through a racial lens I should say that this book is quite unfair to the races because the only people that they keep are Whites and Chinese, but mostly whites. David Webb, the main character was a white, the women Marie was white, along with all the generals. Only in the second section of the book did it start on about Chinese, but still mentioned less than the whites. Other races such as indian, japanese, korean, etc. were not mentioned but European countries like France was noticed, leaving Asia in the dark.
Viewing this book through a lens of class, I should say that this book is quite fair to it. I mean a regular man who was a criminal became a legend and a most feared assassin through out the world in just a matter of 3 years. It also shows how a high class, well educated lady could get turned into a hunted murderer in just a few days. This book shows how the general were quite slow at finding the smart criminal and sometimes make mistakes like believing that David Webb had turned his back on them and got into action to hunt him down and kill him, only to find that he had caught a bad case of amnesia, then treating him like a psycho case. This making them not believe him and not trusting him because of his class, showing how the higher class looks down upon those lower than them.
This book in general is a great book and can be looked through countless lenses, but never goes to a point of where it completely tips a balance in any perspective like races, sexes, etc.
