As you were introducing your two Homeric hero’s I was saddened by your choice of Achilles over Hector. Achilles pitching a fit while many die is our hero because he ultimately helps Ulysses. Hector holding firm for his family seems more heroic in retrospect. Though when I read the stories years ago I rooted against him.
Of all the currently "unfashionable" things that we've suffered from losing in literature, I think the idea of the hero is the one that has deprived us of the most good. Modern fiction thoroughly detests the hero. It started a while back with the desire for stories to be more "realistic" and to depict characters that were less "black and white," but I have always found that to be a failure of reading comprehension on the part of the arguers, rather than a defect in the stories. Almost all of the great works have heroes who possess flaws and struggle to do what's right. Those flaws are simply subtle, and incomprehensible as flaws to a society where selfishness is practically a virtue.
But modern society thinks that if a hero doesn't ever contemplate murdering the villain or sacrificing an innocent for "the cause," then they're "not realistic." What a sad thing that idea suggests about how such readers view the world. Are their children supposed to learn that heroes are by nature grim and bitter, doing "good" only because of some personal (and often frowned-upon) stubbornness against embracing the easy way and doing evil? We've forgotten that literature, at it's best, isn't trying to be "realistic" above all else, but to help make the ideal world we strive for more real. Hopefully we'll remember that again, someday soon...
As you were introducing your two Homeric hero’s I was saddened by your choice of Achilles over Hector. Achilles pitching a fit while many die is our hero because he ultimately helps Ulysses. Hector holding firm for his family seems more heroic in retrospect. Though when I read the stories years ago I rooted against him.
Of all the currently "unfashionable" things that we've suffered from losing in literature, I think the idea of the hero is the one that has deprived us of the most good. Modern fiction thoroughly detests the hero. It started a while back with the desire for stories to be more "realistic" and to depict characters that were less "black and white," but I have always found that to be a failure of reading comprehension on the part of the arguers, rather than a defect in the stories. Almost all of the great works have heroes who possess flaws and struggle to do what's right. Those flaws are simply subtle, and incomprehensible as flaws to a society where selfishness is practically a virtue.
But modern society thinks that if a hero doesn't ever contemplate murdering the villain or sacrificing an innocent for "the cause," then they're "not realistic." What a sad thing that idea suggests about how such readers view the world. Are their children supposed to learn that heroes are by nature grim and bitter, doing "good" only because of some personal (and often frowned-upon) stubbornness against embracing the easy way and doing evil? We've forgotten that literature, at it's best, isn't trying to be "realistic" above all else, but to help make the ideal world we strive for more real. Hopefully we'll remember that again, someday soon...