Heroism is Universal

Here’s an interesting story:

My English teacher sophomore year believed in the power of creative writing. so I, as a student in her honors English II class, was “encouraged” to come up with a different short story every month. At the end of the year, they were collected and compared. She tried to show us just how much we improved over the year; or, in my case, how lazy we got over the year.

The interesting part of this story, however, is the similarity between the creative abilities of the students in the class. Despite the diversity in ethnicity and gender, every student in the class came up with a similar plotline as the basics. A poor pitiful character, with a problem, embarks on a journey with several obstacles along the way. At the end of the tale, the character’s grief is elevated and he returns home.

One has to understand that the main character usually varies from a toothbrush to a king of a mystical kingdom, but in context they were all “heroes”.

A “hero”, in any culture around the world, is defined as one who is admired for his courage and accomplishes something great, a deed which is then called a “heroic deed”. Or, in a more literary sense, a character who takes a journey, willingly or unwillingly, in the unknown and returns changed; in the process, he changes his world or the world.

Based on this definition, the protagonists from Odyssey, Hercules and Beowulf are all similar. Their stories are reflected in modern day as well, although in more style. For instance, there is Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. The popularity of the movies based on DC comics and Marvel and the soon return of Nnja Turtles and Teen Titans reflects our ever growing interest in heroes.

As a human race, we define heroic acts as something generalized like “saving the world” but that may not be just it. Heroic acts can vary from rescuing a cat from a tree to saving the galaxies from erupting into an intergalactic war. The basics are that the acts have to reflect courage; the heroes must go against the odds and they have to accomplish something that’s not only “great” but universally “good”.

Did you notice that in all my definitions of heroes, I never once used the pronoun “she”. That’s because in the usual definition of hero, a man is most likely to be depicted.  King Arthur, Merlin, Hercules and Luke Skywalker were all men. However, those are the “classics”. In the more modern novels, women have stood up as “heroines”. Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, walked the yellow brick road and made a hazardous journey to the Emerald city. Alice from Alice in Wonderland slew the Red Queen. The protagonists from both Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre changed their worlds into what is generally expected positive.

Heroine driven literature is rising to the point where I feel the library shelves are overfilling: Mortal Instruments, Haven, Daughter of the Flame, Graceling, etc.

Bertol Brecht once said “Unhappy the land that needs heroes” and I believe that means that everyone should be a hero not need one. The motif of a hero is the motif of a character that ventures into the unknown, their unconscious, and unlocks its secret. In other words, they reach their full potential as human beings and become changed men and in turn change the world around them.

As the human race, we do not need heroes. Their only role in society is to show us what we can achieve individually.