The Ascendant Conflict Analysis

In the novel, The Ascendant, by Drew Chapman, the United States was in a cyber war with China, where literary elements such as plot development, foreshadowing to create suspense, and point of view are skillfully used to drive the novel. Each of these elements help to convey the story’s central theme: when a war begins to break out, the military are not the only ones whose lives will change entirely. The team attempting to fight back in this covert war against the Chinese faced many struggles, but came out on top in the end. The development of the plot is always a crucial part in a story; from the conflict, the central source of tension and drama, to the climax, where the action comes to its highest point of dramatic conflict, and to the resolution, …show more content…
When Garrett was first recruited to the Ascendant program, he had no idea he would be thrust into the helm of a cyber war. Kline and Truffant had kept him in the dark, at one point even discussing if he knew about such a plan, but he was unaware. A man going by the name of Hans Metternich had also known that something else was going on. He got into contact with Reilly through Avery Bernstein, his boss, saying that Garrett was at the center of something important to billions of people on the planet. Reilly thought he was doing one thing, but was in fact doing something else altogether, which Metternich thought he should know, adding at the risk of sounding melodramatic that very much hangs in the balance. After reaching out through email, they finally met and talked on the Orange Line. Metternich told him that he was being fed lies and that he was being used as an instrument of change without really knowing what that change was, leading him to think about if what he was doing was right later in the novel. Metternich had caused problems for Reilly. After risking talking to him on the Orange Line, he was caught by two Homeland Security agents and taken to a safe house where he proceeded to be tortured for withholding information on how he got into contact with Metternich. He escaped the facility, setting up shack in an old butcher’s shop with the team. With computing …show more content…
The author’s use of third-person point of view is an essential element to the story. If it were told in first person, we would not be able to see the full perspective of what has happened in the novel. First-person point of view limits the story as we are only allowed to see the events through the lens of one character. In a novel about a war, we need to be able to see the story from multiple perspectives to see how it has affected those involved. When we catch glimpses of China, from the perspective of Hu Mei (“The Tiger,”) we see the growth in power of the protests; from the eyes of the government officials, we see the desperation and fear. Xu Jin, China’s director of the Ministry of State Security was at a diplomacy meeting with U.S. Ambassador Robert Smith Townson. Townson had told Xu Jin, “Your tiger is still in its cage,” as a reference to the growing protests. Xu responded angrily, the diplomatic dance gone awry. Through the many lenses we get to see the war in the states, we see how it has affected more than just the military. When the Chinese sold assets at a loss to create panics in real estate, one man, Denny Constantine, killed himself after the hundreds of condos came on the market and clients didn’t want to buy his apartment unit. Through the eyes of the Ascendant, we see the out-of-the-box thinking that led to ending the cyber warfare between the two nations. Garrett’s perspective, as the