Enduring Understandings

Character

Clancy creates the ideal protagonist and antagonist throughout his novels to create characters that will appeal to a very large population. Clancy crafts his perfect protagonists by giving them nationalist views that supersede almost every other character throughout the novel. The main character that we see with this trait throughout most of Clancy's novels is Jack Ryan. For example, in "The Hunt for Red October", Ryan gives up his Christmas break to be the main CIA agent on duty during a Soviet submarine crisis. Most rational people would not give up this special time, especially those with a family like Ryan. This is just one way that Clancy crafts his perfect protagonist throughout his novels. He doesn't just use their extreme nationalist views. He also uses their families. Clancy makes his protagonist be most acceptable to a vast array of audiences. Clancy crafts a world around a nuclear family, with a happy marriage, and a family that is in their middle years of age. Ryan is a middle-aged white male with a wife and two children. This makes his character perfect in the minds of the audience reading the novel, thus creating the perfect protagonist, shown throughout his works like "Patriot Games" and "Without Remorse" as well. Ryan is a character that most people can relate back to and understand more deeply because of the similarities that they might share. Consequently, Clancy must also create his ideal antagonist to complement his ideal protagonists. This antagonist, often times, comes in the form of a Soviet communist. This antagonist is the Politburo and Captain Ramius in "The Hunt for Red October". These characters exemplify the evil of the East that many Americans would fear throughout the Cold War and beyond. With these instinctual fears already in place, Clancy is able to craft the ideal antagonist because the reader already has an innate hatred toward the character. This idea is first shown in the opening lines of "The Hunt for Red October". Ramius talks about his plans to take his nuclear submarine to the Americas, but the audience doesn't know his plans once he arrives. Unfortunately for Ramius, the audience is already rooting against him because they fear the worst possible outcome of this unknown circumstance. Clancy is able to capitalize off of his audience predisposition to craft his ideal antagonist. Both of these characters make strong appearances throughout his novels as Jack Ryan, Jack Reacher, and often times the Soviet Union or its military. Through Clancy's appeal to his audience, he is able to craft the perfect protagonist and complementary antagonist for a vast audience.

Setting

Clancy creates enthralling settings through his use of highly confidential settings that create a sense of wonder in the audience. The first setting, and most intriguing setting to talk about, is the Pentagon. Throughout Clancy's works of "The Hunt for Red October" and "Patriot Games," he makes several shifts to meetings or projects being conducted in the basements of the Pentagon. This setting gives crucial insight into the inner workings of the Pentagon that most audience members would not know anything about. The vivid descriptions of the President giving a speech or hearing a military briefing in a soundproof meeting room gives crucial explanation to the questions that some audience members might have about the settings throughout Clancy's novels, but Clancy has many more setting choices like the submarines in "The Hunt for Red October." The USS Dallas is crucial to creating an enthralling setting in Clancy's novel. Clancy not only gives in depth details that are highly specific to United States Navy vessels but he also gives his audience the ability to identify the various characters of submarine sailors. This idea is clearly shown through the character of Mancuso in "The Hunt for Red October." He is a stern and unrelenting officer that takes pride in his crew's success. He also rewards it graciously throughout the novel. This setting not only quenches the thirst of knowledge that some may have for United States submarines, but it also describes the type of people needed to operate a submarine, a stern officer and hardworking crew. Similarly, Clancy uses military bases and schools in "Without Remorse" to vividly show the characters and complexities that come with serving in some of these places, especially when the characters are left in the dark about major operations like those in Norfolk, Virginia in "The Hunt for Red October." Finally, Clancy uses the complexities of the Central Intelligence Agency throughout most of his works to create wonder in his audience. Ryan works for the CIA which allows for many of the settings to take place in high-ranking officials' offices of the CIA and many of the project laboratories. Much of his audience would have no experience with any top-secret information that could be portrayed through the simple descriptions of these settings in his novels. Clancy uses these areas to describe the importance of Ryan's work and show his audience how important the CIA is throughout his novels. All of these highly confidential settings allow for Clancy to create enthralling settings that promote wonder in his audience.

"Life is about learning; when you stop learning, you die." - Tom Clancy

Plot/Structure

Clancy structures his books in such a way to create order and understanding throughout the entirety of the plot to allow audiences to better understand his novels. This idea can be best understood by his inclusion of many military terms and back stories within the first couple chapters of his novels. In "The Hunt for Red October," Clancy begins the novel with the backstory of Captain Ramius and gives a brief explanation of the various roles within the Soviet Union's navy. He gives this information through the type of vessels used and the ranks, in Russian, so they could be used freely throughout the novel. This explanation also allows his entire audience to understand fully the plot of the novel as it progresses because they have an entire understanding of the concepts in the novel. This also allows Clancy to further his plot faster and with more action that would be expected from these action-packed novels. With an understanding of the concepts, Clancy can jump seamlessly between the American and Russian submarines in "The Hunt for Red October." This allows him to create a novel that is action packed and quick to read, yet it allows him to have a novel that can be truly understood and analyzed even at this pace. Clancy also structures his text into broken sets of paragraphs to focus solely on the setting at hand at that current moment in the novel. In "The Hunt for Red October," Clancy often times uses a sub heading in the text to clearly label when a setting is changed. This helps the readers understand the various parts of the novel and distinguish between the multitude of government settings. This not only helps to this effect, but it also helps to clearly show the power levels within the United States and Soviet militaries. This idea is prevalent because the various settings often times contain certain characters. This is most common in "The Hunt for Red October" where it is utilized in every chapter, but it can be seen in "Red Storm Rising" and "Patriot Games" as well. With this ability to show the hierarchy in the respective militaries, Clancy can lead readers to assumptions of the events that will transpire within the settings. This once again allows for a deeper understanding of the text because the reader is expecting what they are about to read. This allows them to comprehend the novel in a deeper and more meaningful manner. Overall, Clancy creates understandable novels through the way he structures his novels.

Speaker

Tom Clancy uses his speakers to create uncertainty throughout his novels because of their reliability and points of view. In most of his novels Clancy uses an unreliable narrator that uses their knowledge of a situation to lead the readers down a path that the book truly is not taking. This unreliability can be first seen in his novel "The Hunt for Red October is which the character Greer thinks one way about a situation while Ryan thinks another. In this situation that narrator doesn't know what is actually happening, so the readers are left to infer what the actual events of the novel will be. This reliability issue causes great uncertainty in the novel because there are several narratives that could be followed, but only one truly is. This is also prevalent in "Patriot Games" where once again the narrator describes Greer's plans as the correct ones, but Ryan's predictions are the ultimate events of the novel. Throughout Clancy's novels he creates great uncertainty because of the reliability of his narrators, but Clancy also creates this uncertainty through the points of view that are presented. In all of his novels the narrator is a third person speaker that knows most of the inner feelings of the main character. This point of view allows an expanded understanding of this character's inner feelings, but it doesn't allow the readers to understand the inner feelings and thoughts of the other characters. Often times this results in the reader's questioning what will be the next actions from the characters around the main character while they know the exact next move of the main character. Once again, Clancy clearly shows this during the climax of "The Hunt for Red October." Ryan is sneaking through one dark side of the missile bay while Captain Ramius is sneaking on the other side. During this whole event, the reader know exactly the feelings and thoughts of Ryan and they do not know the actions of Ramius. This point of view discrepancy creates a lot of uncertainty at this point because what could Ramius be doing? The uncertainty created through the points of views of the narrator play a massive part in the success of Clancy's novel, especially because he uses this in almost every one of his novels. All in all, Clancy creates uncertainty in his texts through the reliability of the narrator and the points of view of the narrator.

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