Brent has a Ph.D. in American culture with a specialty in film studies from the University of Michigan. She is a freelance writer and teaches courses in the history of American cinema. In the following essay, Brent discusses references to historically real people in Mukherjee's story "The Middleman."

Throughout Mukherjee's short story "The Middleman," the narrator, Alfie Judah, a "middleman" in the illegal arms trade, makes reference to several historical and media personalities, including Ted Turner, Che Guevara, and Miguel de Cervantes. In the following essay, I discuss each of these three historically real figures and their significance to the central themes of the story.

Alfie, the narrator, mentions several times throughout the story that most of the men in Clovis Ransome's employ wear Ted Turner baseball caps. Ted Turner (1938-) rose to power in the late twentieth century as a media mogul who pioneered the...