Five Decembers Q8: Heroes and villains?

NeilNjae

Is McGrady a good man, a hero, a role model, someone to look up to? What makes you say that? What's admirable about him, how is he flawed or bad?

By the same token, who are the villains? And what is the attitude of Americans towards Japanese as a whole? To what extent are the Japanese portrayed a faceless yellow horde, and to what extent are they humans?

Apocryphal

I think McGrady is a well-meaning enough fellow, and is sympathetic to the every day joe. This is an aspirational quality. Does he have flaws? Sure. He’s pretty jaded, and becomes more so over the course of the novel. He also doesn’t really understand the US diplomat in Japan. I’m not really sure he’s approachable enough to like. He might be boring to hang out with.

I think the villains are the nazis and their sympathizers. Our viewpoint into the Japanese mentality comes from a pair of polite pacifists, so defiantly not Portrayed as a faceless horde. I think the bureaucracy is the faceless horde, Japanese or American.

RichardAbbott

I think I'm sort of repeating @Apocryphal 's point, but I'm not sure that any individuals here are either heroes or villains. The protagonists have flaws (in some cases, serious ones) alongside their more noble qualities, and the villains are given credible motivations fir their actions rather than just being bad because they're bad. If there are villains, they are kind of force-of-nature ones larger than any individual can control, such as the world conflict and its impact on everyday life.

NeilNjae

@RichardAbbott said:
I think I'm sort of repeating @Apocryphal 's point, but I'm not sure that any individuals here are either heroes or villains.

So, John Smith's not a villain for torturing people to death? Takahashi Kansei isn't a hero for saving McGrady's life?

How should McGrady be different in order to be a "hero", or is the hardboiled genre one that does not allow heroes and villains?

I agree with @Apocryphal that McGrady would be rather boring to hang out with.

Apocryphal

Aren’t heroes generally selfless, and villains selfish? In that sense, it’s easy to see how no one is purely one or the other. However, I do think Smith is a villain - even though he has a higher cause, it’s essentially a selfish one. Takahashi was not heroic. McGrady is more like an antihero.

RichardAbbott

@NeilNjae said:
So, John Smith's not a villain for torturing people to death? Takahashi Kansei isn't a hero for saving McGrady's life?

How should McGrady be different in order to be a "hero", or is the hardboiled genre one that does not allow heroes and villains?

Yes, fair point. I guess what I meant to write was that "I'm not sure that any individuals here are either simplistic heroes or villains". All of the main ones have both likeable and unlikable qualities, so that their heroic or villainous overall position (so to speak) is balanced by facets of their opposite.

RichardAbbott

Something else that just occurred to me today as an interesting subversion of tropes was the choice of Takahashi as a pacifist Japanese man. I don't think I have ever read before that there was such a group, but it's reasonable that they existed. But mostly the wartime Japanese trope is either implacably martial, or towards the end of the war deeply ashamed of the substandard quality of war material, and of the compromises that were having to be made.

My realisation of this came about through watching Kenneth Branagh's Belfast last night - I didn't much rate the film (but then, don't have much personal or family stake in Northern Ireland) but the point of contact here is that the religious / sectarian violence normally in focus was only backdrop to the film, and the main personal conflict was between a moderate Protestant family and various extremist / fundamentalist Protestants.

NeilNjae

A quick look online shows various anti-war Japanese before and during WW2. I think I knew that the war wasn't universally popular before it started (but many fell into supporting the war once it did).

But, the general point is one about the limited and stereotypical information in Western education and popular culture. And that's a good point to make.