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Page 147
I shall refer also to the stories in For Your Eyes Only (1960) and to The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), but shall not take into consideration The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), which seems quite untypical.
6.1. The Opposition of Characters and of Values
The novels of Fleming seem to be built on a series of oppositions which allow a limited number of permutations and interactions. These dichotomies constitute invariant features around which minor couples rotate as free variants. I have singled out fourteen couples, four of which are opposing characters, the others being opposing values, variously personified by the four basic characters:
(1) Bond-M;
(2) Bond-Villain;
(3) Villain-Woman;
(4) Woman-Bond;
(5) Free World-Soviet Union;
(6) Great Britain-Non-Anglo-Saxon Countries;
(7) Duty-Sacrifice;
(8) Cupidity-Ideals;
(9) Love-Death;
(10) Chance-Planning;
(11) Luxury-Discomfort;
(12) Excess-Moderation;
(13) Perversion-Innocence;
(14) Loyalty-Disloyalty.
These pairs do not represent 'vague' elements but 'simple' ones that are immediate and universal, and, if we consider the range of each pair, we see that the variants allowed in fact include all the narrative devices of Fleming.
Bond-M is a dominated-dominant relationship which characterizes from the beginning the limits and possibilities of the character of Bond and which sets events moving. Psychological and psychoanalytical interpretations of Bond's attitude toward M have been discussed in particular by Kingsley Amis. The fact is that, even in terms of pure fictional functions, M represents to Bond the one who has a global view of the events, hence his superiority over the 'hero' who depends upon him and who sets out on his various missions in conditions of inferiority to the omniscient chief. Frequently, his chief sends Bond into adventures the upshot of which he had discounted from the start. Bond is thus often the victim of a trickand it does not matter whether things happen to him beyond the cool calculations of M. The tutelage under which M holds Bondobliged

 
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