If both Fredrich Nietzsche in the 19th century and John Paul Sartre in the 20th declared the "death of God" in philosophy, the "antihero" punctuates the theme in modern European and American literature. In a universe where life is meaningless and anxiety the only reasonable mood in the face of ultimate oblivion, the heroic themes we have studied up until now seem to dissipate. No one is responsible for the "state" in the Classical sense, and Socrates' advocacy of the "virtuous life" becomes obscure in the ambiguities of relative "good" and "evil." Individual relativism, the proper posture for the modern period, justifies only personal commitment and self-motivated action. That "existence" precedes "essence," the theme of existentialism, dismisses as meaningless all the comforting absolutes of both science and religion that have come before and isolates the individual in a "community of one"; that is, nothing can be more lonely than the person who must confront his or her death in a universe that doesn't care. 

In such a "modern temper," where stands the "hero"? 

In "The Fallen Hero," William Pfaff (1984) traces the demise of the military hero to horrors of World War I, the "war to end all wars," the "war to make the world safe for democracy," when the heroes of the most civilized nations of the Western World slaughtered each other in the hundreds of thousands over footholds on either side of a two hundred mile line in the mud. Fervent devoteés of the Roman Catholic Holy Mother of God on both sides of the line raised their angry banners, both imploring protection of the same Virgin Mary, as they hunkered down behind gas masks in their rat-infested trenches. More than a million young heroes who had glided off to war so spiritedly would die. 

World War I shattered many of the easy assumptions of the Christian nations, and the phrase "special providence" all but dropped out of devotional literature of the mainline Protestant Christian denominations. Psychologically-battered soldiers mingled with the disillusioned, ex-patriated American intellectuals in the European coffee houses of Paris, London, and Madrid, re-examining with snickering skepticism what Faulkner in time would come to reaffirm, "all the old verities and truths of the heart that alone are worth writing about, worth all the agony and the sweat." World War I had set the "hero" adrift across a sea of ambiguities and irreconcilable ironies. 

This is the context of the "antihero" or the "ironic hero." Unlike the modern heroes, Willy Loman and Ike McCaslin, who rise up to defend basic human dignity (reflecting Arthur Miller's criterion for heroic action in the same modern condition described above), the "ironic" or "anti-hero" acts without cause or value, staring aimlessly at nothing, blowing meaningless smoke rings in a dark corner of T. S. Eliot's "wasteland." 

Don Lazaro Cárdenas, mayor of San Martín Comitán, in Marshall Bennett Connelly's "from 'Three Dirges,'" exemplifies the antihero who wears the meaningless, empty trappings of civil and political responsibility, but who has been reduced to the stature of the messenger boy who brings only death rather than life to his community. Ironically, his townspeople question only the whereabouts of their priest who appears to have abandoned them at their gravest time of need--as if their priest and whose faith they have served so long could possibly make a difference. Ultimately, it must be the decision of the boys themselves to lift the terrible burden of choice from their parents; it will be the boys themselves who alone can give meaning to the townspeople whose lives their own sacrifices will save. 

The choice of the boys of San Martín Comitán, Guatemala, to lay down their own lives so that their families and neighbors in the town might live reaffirms the dignity and value that they perceive in living. If the life of the town was not worth saving, then their sacrifice would be meaningless, and rather than as ennobling, their own deaths would have been empty gestures. The sacrifice of the boys is juxtaposed against the circumstances and conditions of both the mayor and their own parents whose decisions to have sacrificed the boys would have abrogated both their civil and parental responsibilities; in spite of the consequences to the town, neither Don Lazaro or the parents could have made the decision to sacrifice their own citizens and children, respectively. The determination to lay down their own lives was a decision that only the boys could have made for themselves, for their families, and for the town. 

What we have in Connelly's compelling story interestingly mingles the modern with the antihero in twentieth-century literature, juxtaposing the tragic fool with Arthur Miller's neo-modern tragic hero. 

Geoff Grimes 

To better understand the "modern temper," go to the Existentialism Home Page. 

This page was last modified on January 16, 2006, 
and is maintained by Dr. Geoffrey Grimes.
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