Outside Reading Post

Well, we've finally reached the end of the first quarter and with it the end of this blog topic. It's an emotional time for all of us...
just kidding
Anyway for my final blog I'm going to talk about potential themes that I saw in The Bourne Supremacy by Robert Ludlum. This book is written in a way that provokes many themes. Everything that is told is told in a way that could be seen as hard to pick a theme out of. The writing is fast paced, action oriented, and much of the time seemingly unthoughtful. This may be true in a few rare cases but most of the time things were meant not only by the story but by the abstract writing style as well.
One of the things that pulls a theme out in this book is the use of David Webb and Jason Bourne. They are the same person but are written as separate characters. Both of them have two very different personalities but we can see that they are, deep down, almost the same. This brings out the theme that to succeed in any endeavor, one must first get to know themselves. David asks, "What do you do when there is a part of you that you hate?"(646). Marie replies "Accept it. He's the one who brought you back to me" (646). From this quote we can see that although Webb does not like his dangerous side, but because he was able to use it and know it, he saved his wife Marie and she is, obviously, very grateful. Also we can infer that if David himself had tried to rescue Marie from the government and the Chinese that he would have failed. But he knew what Bourne could do and he was able to use that.
Another theme that I noticed in this novel is the idea that the motives behind an action do not justify the actions themselves. This may be a fairly obvious theme but it takes center stage with no problem. Marie is abducted and held captive just to get her husband to come to China and help capture a killer. While this end may be justifiable the actions used to get there are not. Bourne tells one of his wife's captors, "It's obvious that she didn't have a damn thing to with it. Let her go!"(159). Bourne is furious that his wife has been dragged into this. He agrees that this killer must be caught but he is severely opposed to how they got him to do it. Throughout the rest of the book Bourne is very distrusting of the government for obvious reasons and this shows us how serious their infraction was.
Well, so there's a couple themes, kind of a boring topic but since this is English, somewhat necessary. Overall this book seemed to fit well inside the thriller genre which is what I expected, the writing was still fairly complex though, which lends an analytical element to the story. I'm not sure if I would recommend this book to anyone, especially those who think that it will resemble the movie. I enjoyed reading the book, but the first book in the series was much better and would still make sense if left alone.
So if you do decide to read this book, I'm open for discussion. There is definitely a lot to talk about.