The Spy Who Came In From The Cold Analysis

John Le Carre’s novel “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” tells the tale of Alec Leamas, a spy who is working for the British in their attempts to bring down the Communist Soviet party occupying East Berlin. Leamas is depicted as a hard man who has little time for emotions or feelings, until he meets Liz Gold, a colleague at the library Leamas finds himself working at after being dismissed from his espionage service. Although Leamas proves to initially be reluctant to engage in any sort of relationship with Liz, he agrees to have dinner with her after working at the library for three weeks. They eventually become lovers, but Leamas hides most of his personality from her, only occasionally showing any part of his identity to her. When she asks him personal and philosophical questions, he states that he does not like “conversations about life” (Le Carre 31). Furthermore, when

When he is being interrogated by Fiedler, a Jewish agent on the Soviet side, he thinks to himself how “Even when he was alone, he compelled himself to live with the personality he had assumed” (130). Leamas’ hesitancy to acknowledge any true feelings is due to the nature of his work; he knows that as a spy he can never afford to let his guard down, and through time he has allowed his occupation to consume him. Fiedler, judges Leamas as an “objective” man who possesses “the virtue of indifference” and other than Leamas’ feelings for Liz, this appears to be the case throughout the novel. Although it is only briefly touched upon by the narrator, at one point in Leamas life he did have a wife, and kids, but he has been divorced for quite some time and has not been in contact with anyone in his family. Liz proves to be the only person in the world who Leamas truly cares about, and he proves this by choosing to die with her, rather than to come in from the