The Day of the Jackal

After accepting the assignment to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, the Jackal’s first step is to amass a collection of false documents. Ironically, the man whose name is never revealed in the novel has more documentation than anyone else. His variety of documents symbolizes his shifting identity. He can be the Danish priest, the American student, the French war veteran, or an Englishman who actually died in childhood. None of these identities is the real Jackal, but the documents suggest that they are more of a true identity than anything else that the audience can latch onto. The false documents symbolize the unknowability of the Jackal’s identity, to the point where the audience can only ever refer to the Jackal by his codename, while the other characters interact with Alexander Duggan, Pastor Jensen, Marty Schulberg, or Andre Martin. The Jackal is all of these men and none of them. His false documents function as a symbol of his unknowability, symbols which contain a deeper truth about his slippery anonymity.

The attempt to track the Jackal is conducted through the medium of identifying false identities. These documents symbolize the fine line between success and failure, as well as the fine line between life and death. The Jackal kills the forger who tries to extort him for the original documents. He knew the Jackal’s actual name and, as soon as he hinted that he could not be trusted, he was eliminated. The worth of the false documents is not counted in the sum that the Jackal agrees to pay the forger, but in the speed with which he decides to take the forger’s life. Anonymity is invaluable to the Jackal, so the authorities’ attempts to track him are conducted according to the false documents that he holds. This is a fundamental irony of Lebel’s task: his one mission, he says, is to learn the name of the Jackal and this is made much harder by the prevalence of false identities. These disposable identities hinder Lebel and his men, as the Jackal sheds them as soon as he fears that he may have been compromised. Each document that he discards, each identity which he abandons, symbolizes the progress of Lebel’s case. The documents are a shield to the Jackal’s true self and they are gradually shed until the detective comes face to face with the killer.

At the end of the novel, Lebel stops the Jackal. De Gaulle survives, so Lebel succeeds in his primary objective, but he never succeeds in the goal he set for himself. With the real Charles Calthrop returning from his trip to Scotland, the police must reckon with the truth that they never learned the Jackal’s real name. The documents and false identities were as close as they came to knowing him, meaning that Lebel’s original goal is never achieved. In the final chapter, Lebel attends the quiet funeral when the Jackal is buried in an unmarked grave. In England, the authorities are preparing to wash their hands of the killer as he cannot reliably be linked to England. There are no documents left with which to identify him. In effect, the unmarked grave becomes the final document in the Jackal’s life. More than most, this document is an authentic symbol of his unknowability. Only Lebel came close to ever really knowing him and, at this juncture, he has no idea as to the man’s true identity. The grave is a symbolic document of Lebel’s failure and the unknowability of the Jackal.