Agent 6 Literary Elements

Historical Fiction

Soviet (Russia), Afghanistan, New York. The time of the novel in in the late 20th century

The narrator is third-person omniscient and tells the story of the main characters sometimes in their point of views and most of the times as an observer.

Melancholic, patriotic, revengeful

The main protagonist is Leo. The antagonist throughout the story is not a specific person but mostly it is a person or more than one person who has a high rank in the Soviet government

There is an external major conflict that doesn't change throughout the novel: Communists and Capitalists, each trying to defeat the other.

The internal conflicts are several. But the main one is Leo's conflict with his life after it was destroyed by his wife's murder. He faces many obstacles and his life becomes a miserable one.

The course of the story changed dramatically when Jesse Austin was murdered and Leo's wife, Raisa, was also murdered.

Leo's constant worry about his family's trip to New York and his persistence to try and stop them from going foreshadowed that something bad will happen, especially that Leo was a professional secret police who was trained and had the natural talent of feeling if something is not right.

"He could afford such a loss. Perhaps he carried around too much pride in his any case." This is an understatement because there is nothing as too much pride, one act of humiliation can make this pride go away in a second, no matter how large it is.

There were several allusions to Joseph Stalin, the Communist Soviet leader during a period of modernization. However, he was known for his dictatorship and murder and execution of millions of innocent lives just to seize the power. Stalin's name was mentioned several times in the story with some of the most famous quotes he said because the Soviets were required to memorize these quotes or keep them in their notebooks. Although it seemed as if the Soviets looked up to Stalin, it was obvious in the story that it was just for propaganda, and that they knew what Stalin did to his people from famine, torture, and death.

"The cloud cover parted as neatly as if a hand had pulled back a theatrical curtain, revealing New York City to the audience circling in the sky. The Hudson River split like a tuning fork around the narrow Island of Manhattan, on which the fabled skyscrapers were so neat and numerous that the city appeared like a geometric creation composed entirely of straight lines." Page 74

"Better to sleep in a barracks, the proper place for a soldier."
"Soon he'd be designated his own car, a larger home, perhaps even a dacha..."
The two statements are paradoxical because although Leo is granted numerous luxuries that weren't given except to people of authority, he still wanted to live in a barracks. He felt that this is too luxurious for him, especially that he was alone without a family.

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"There were stains on the walls as if the whole building were sick, suffering rashlike symptoms."