Topic 2: The Hero

The Heroic Character in Literature

Conflict is the essential element in the short story just as the plot is in the ancient Greek epic and dramatic tragedy. The author of that conflict within plots is the action of the characters. In his Poetics, Aristotle identified action as the key to understanding a character whose affairs are the focus of all three genres. Within the short story, just as in the epic and the tragedy, the actions of one dominating character usually precipitate or control the action of all other characters in the work. Sometimes called the "major character," that agent has often been referred to as the hero.

When we think of a "heroes" in the popular sense, we often focus on people--either men or women--who distinguish themselves through some kind of meritorious action, often risking their own lives in the service of others. Each year, cities honor their fire fighters and police officers who "place themselves in harm's way" in sometimes the most desperate and dangerous circumstances. In the canon of imaginative literature, however, the hero is something more complex--and rarely so admirable!

Like Homer's Odysseus returning to his home in Ithaca from the Trojan wars, ancient heroes exhibit great strength, cunning, and tenacity. They lead by virtue of their command and charisma. They engage a willing following who place their lives in their heroes' control. Odysseus champions both natural and supernatural obstacles in his return home across the Mediterranean Sea, avoiding the clashing rocks and a monstrous whirlpool, Scylla and Charybdis, and tricking his way out of the beguiling clutches of the Sirens. While many perish against the perils of the sea and horrific wonders of the world, his comrades would never think to follow another.

Frequently, the heroes of myth and legend maintain the state if they're not the very founders themselves. Suckled by the she-wolf, Romulus and Remus created Rome while a half a world away, Hunahpú and Xbalanque, the two hero twins of the Quiché Maya in Central America, tricked the Lords of Xibalba, the Gods of the Underworld, and through magic and witchcraft, survived their own sacrifices to outwit death and to restore life. 

In classic Greek tragedy, the hero is the king with whose decisions rest the well-being of the people they serve. Oedipus, king of Thebes, once secured the city from famine in answering the riddle of the Sphinx, but in his over-zealous pursuit of knowledge, borne on his bombastic pride, he discovers that he himself is the sordid sinner who, in slaying his father and marrying his mother as prophesied, must sacrifice himself to save the state.

More often than not, Shakespearean heroes are complex degenerates, struggling against fate, the supernatural, and a host of tragic flaws. Spurred on by jealousy, rage, resentment, misjudgment, or unbridled greed, they sacrifice the lives of the very ones closest to them--even their wives and daughters--at the behest of their several weaknesses. Richard, III and Macbeth are quintessential evil. King Lear is a brazened, self-indulgent old fool, and Hamlet and Othello, are both passionately pathetic. Heroes are not always a very pretty lot!

Archetypal theory and psycho-analysis from the late-nineteenth century and early twentieth century traces within the ventures and misadventures some universal patterns. When examined at something of a distance, they fall interestingly into four distinct hero types: 1) the Hero of Adventure, 2) the Hero of the Quest, 3) the Sacrificial Hero, and 4) the Hero of Initiation. Parading through the canon of the world's mythology, these four patterns are etched deeply, according to archetypal theory, into the interior of human unconsciousness where our common and universal experience is sublimated, only to erupt in our dream world and the stories we continue to weave and tell about ourselves. Our dreams illuminate these patterns within us, and on their behalf, perhaps unwittingly, we act.

Twentieth-century playwright Arthur Miller finds it difficult to relate to these heroes of the past, deferring, instead, to the possibility of a different, "modern hero." Exploring the nature of tragedy and the tragic hero in contemporary circumstances, Miller redefines the character of the hero. In "Tragedy and the Common Man" (1949), Miller recognizes the heroic in the commonplace and normal affairs of daily living, embodied in those individuals who, in the face of inhumanity, elect to act with hope and the possibility of righting wrong. Miller notes, "The tragic feeling is invoked whenever we are in the presence of a character, any character, who is ready to sacrifice his life, if need be, to secure one thing--his sense of personal dignity." From his reassessment, modern heroes abound, marching across the social, political, and military stages of the twentieth- century. In that spirit, the late Dr. Samuel Proctor, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York and close friend of the Martin Luther King, Sr. family, once observed: "People say we need another 'Dr. Martin Luther King.' I say we don't need another 'Martin Luther King.' What we need is a thousand 'Martin Luther Kings' all across our nation, one in every town and hamlet across this country."

While, unfortunately, it's often only the back pages of Sunday supplements that recognize our modern heroes, front pages of our newspapers broadcast the adventures and triumphs of our "pop culture" heroes. Elvis is the "King," so "Long Live the King!" But we need our Michael Jordan’s and Joe Montana’s and our "Flo Jo’s," at least as much as we need our Charles DeGaulles, Susan B. Anthony’s, and Dwight Eisenhower’s, as much as we need our Rosa Parks and our Dr. Martin Luther Kings--if scattered invisibly now in "every town and hamlet across this country." Our "pop culture" heroes represent so often what we would achieve ourselves, if only . . . And they stir within us the old fires of our childhood fancies and loft once more our flights of adventure out there in the remote and far away in time, place, and human experience.

The Heroes of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance gave rise in the European Romantic Period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a new set of cultural figures that had never appeared before in Western Civilization (Peckham, 1970). If one was the "Virtuoso" who takes perfection to a new edge, the Romantic Period also spawned the Bohemian and the anti-hero, the "Fop" who, like Oscar Wilde, would dress to the hilt in the raiment of the day--to "out-Victorian the Victorian"--only to expose the emptiness and the sham often lying behind the elegance. In the twentieth-century generations of the Beats, the "flower children," and the Woodstockers, the "tuned out and turned on" Goths and other anti-socials express stylistically at least the angst of the "anti/ironic" hero who rejects heroic service to society in a very personal and private quest for self expression and demonstration.

The definitions of the hero over the centuries are touchstones by which human beings have often defined themselves and the meaning they derive in living through the mundane experiences of the day-by-days. If, as Thomas Huxley says in "Waterworks and Kings," everyone needs to help build the castle even if he or she will never live in one, so perhaps do we need our heroes in which to mirror our own heartfelt dreams and yearnings against our own inevitable death beyond the frailties of "the human condition."

Dr. Geoff Grimes 

 

This page was last modified on February 10, 2006,
and is maintained by Dr. Geoffrey Grimes.