Third Man - Is There a Hero?

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In The Third Man, Graham Greene gives expression to his impatience with the Cold War politics of the time by refusing to take an ideological stance on either side. Instead, he offers a parody of the Cold War, as Rollo Martins turns Old Vienna into the American Old West in his search for the killers of his hero, Harry Lime. Heroes and hero worship are parodied in "The Third Man". The closest Greene comes to the portrayal of a hero is in the character, Anna. The depiction of "weak heroes", "sympathetic villains" and heroic women confronts the dominant, mainstream ideology of the era, which was represented in an extreme form in popular literature such as "westerns". Rollo Martins is portrayed as a writer of "westerns" who appears to perceive others, and himself, in terms of the values of his 'novellettes'. Sentiments expressed by Martins lead Calloway to comment that Martin's expressions sound like "a cheap novellette" (Greene, 1988, p.25). When Martins fights for the honour of his dead friend, he positions Calloway as a "sheriff" instead of a policeman. "I have to call them (policemen) sheriffs" (p.26). Martins mentions his book the "Lone Rider of Santa Fe" twice (p.25 and p.32) and describes the plot of the story. A "lone rider" whose "best friend" was shot unlawfully by a sheriff, hunts the sheriff down. His perception of himself as one of the heroes in his westerns is confirmed when he states that he is "gunning just the same way for Colonel Callaghan" (misspelling the policeman's name) (p.32). The emphasis on "westerns" in The Third Man provides an oblique reference to the Cold War. A dominant theme of "westerns" is "the conflict of East and West - or, more precisely, the conflict between the values symbolised by the East.. and the those symbolised by the West" (Meyer, 1974. P.668/26). In his comparison of the writing of two popular
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