The Thirty-Nine Steps Themes

The Thirty-Nine Steps Themes

The Art of the Disguise

From his initial masquerade as a milkman on, the protagonist Richard Hannay takes on a dizzying amount of disguises during his adventure. Sometimes Hannay's transformation seems to happen merely on the surface: he changes clothes with the milkman, and this uniform alone is sufficient to fool anyone on Hannay's tail and allow him to escape to the train station. Similarly, the simple adoption of a thick Scottish brogue on the train ingratiates him to the lower-class Scots on the train, allowing him to blend in. However, Hannay's disguises can be shown to progress, to where mere appearance is not sufficient enough. Hannay's "white lie" in which he declares he's a Free Trader leads him to a political meeting and the compulsion to give a rousing political speech for a subject he knows nothing about. Here Hannay's disguise is tested, and Hannay passes the test through sheer resourcefulness.

Later, Hannay...
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