He is just as surreal as Palahniuk's Tyler Durden, and yet he is not freeing any hero from consumerist enslavement but -- on the other hand -- burying the reader behind a false and deluded masculine mythology -- namely, that a masculine hero is virile not because he "knows himself" and seeks virtue but because he knows how to drive fast cars, win at cards, be physically fit and agile, and out-step evil doers. Bond does not embody the traditional masculine role or even the Romantic hero that Palahniuk's hero represents, but rather the kind of self-centered, egomaniacal machismo fantasy that springs out of the head of Hemingway in the early 20th century, like Athena out of the head of Zeus. Bond is not truly antagonistic to homosexuality because he fails to secure for himself a feminine mate: even though he offers to marry Vesper, she is pursued by something...
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