Revenger, character

In the first of a projected trilogy, Stephenson explores alchemy as one of the roots of mathematics and computers. With the ancestors of characters appearing in Cryptonomicon (Stephenson s previous novel), this literary adventure traverses Europe of the 1700s, with stops in the laboratories of some of the most famous scientists of the day, while in a separate timeline set one hundred years earlier, a drifter attempts to help a young woman exact revenge against her former captors... 

After his failure to realize love, as he conceives it, in life, Stendhal turned to fiction. It is often said, and often contested, that Stendhal s novels are exercises in revenge or in wish-fulfilment. I believe it is obviously false to say that they are only this, yet there is an important element of truth in the idea that he tried to realize by proxy what he failed to do himself. This is most clearly true of Lucien Leu wen, which is why in the following I shall focus on this work. But it is also true of Le Rouge et le Noir, La Chartreuse de Parme and even - perhaps especially - of Lamiel. The protagonist of the latter is a girl, who more than any other character in Stendhal s novels has the trait which he finds in himself, cette gaiet qui fait peur, qui est devenue mon lot (Stendhal 1982, p. 518). 

In The Revenger s Tragedy a vital irony and a deep pessimism exist in disjunction if they are held together dramatically they are not in any sense aesthetically integrated, either in tone or character. And if there is an attitude linking them by violence together it is not that of the unified sensibility once thought to characterise the period [a sensibility perhaps associated with the Shakespearean ], but rather that of a subversive black camp. ... 

The essential dramatic conflict is the same for most Bond filrrrs (lethal danger, evil antagonist, tragic female. Bond as savior). Bond has personal reasons for revenge, and his character expands and from these, and other emotional conflicts, including the sinister undertones in himself. It is essential for the music to provide these depths, lest Bond appear heartlessly one-dimensional. 

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