General Andres Villiers

Character Analysis

Fathers and Son

General Villiers is a wounded older man who shows up toward the end of the novel. He is not to be confused with Geoffrey Washburn, the wounded older man who shows up at the beginning of the novel.

Washburn and Villiers are obviously different in some ways. Washburn, a doctor, is wounded in that he's a drunk. He helps Bourne by patching him up after he's been shot and dropped in the ocean. Villiers is wounded in that his son has been killed—and also, we later learn, in that his young second wife is actually Carlos's lover and has been betraying him, which he finds understandably upsetting. In case you missed it, this woman is the lover and accomplice of the guy who killed Villiers's son. That's got to hurt. Villiers helps Bourne by spying on his wife, and (eventually) by vouching for him to the American embassy.

Despite the plot differences, though, Washburn and Villiers fill the same basic role—they're both flawed surrogate fathers. Villiers, obviously, is the more important one, not just because we see more of him, but also because his experience as a father mirrors Bourne's own: Villiers's son was a politician assassinated by Carlos, and Bourne's son was killed in Cambodia by a bomb dropped from a rogue airplane. Both of them have lives marked by violence and loss.

Dad to the Rescue

Why, then, do we have all these fathers and sons? Why do we need these wounded old men popping up at the beginning and the end of the novel? As with much in The Bourne Identity, the answer seems to have less to do with theme or symbol than with plot.

At one point, Villiers explains that he has entered politics to carry on for his dead son: "It is customary for the son to carry on for the father," he says. However: "In this matter, it was the father's legacy to carry on for the son" (25.45). Now, in one way, that's an underlying motivation for the events in the story. Both Villiers and Bourne get into all this trouble because they're trying to avenge the deaths of their murdered family members.

But beyond that, the surrogate fathers in this book—Villiers and Washburn—serve a different, equally important function: they fix things for Bourne, their surrogate son. When the tangling plot gets too knotty to unravel in any other way, they swoop in and save the day. At the beginning of the book, Bourne needs someone to help him until he heals. At the end of the book, he needs someone sufficiently highly placed to save him from the unsalvageable dead end into which the plot has thrown him. Daddies fix things, so The Bourne Identity supplies a couple of daddies—and a couple of dead sons as motivations.