What is a Hero, anyway?

I’ve been thinking about this, thanks to a recent conjunction of story experiences.

1. Spider-Man 2—while channel flipping, I came upon one of my favorite scenes in the world, the one where Spidey stops a runaway commuter train with such effort that he collapses and is pulled into the train by the grateful rescued people who pass him overhead and lay him gently on the floor, mask missing.

2. 300—finally got out to see this big screen movie of Frank Miller’s graphic novel interpretation of the battle of Thermopylae, in which a few Spartans, insanely outnumbered, save Western civilization as we know it by holding off the Persian hordes.

3. Watership Down—dipped into this old favorite while revising an essay I’ve been working on. A rabbit named Hazel leads his little band to a new home and concocts a plan to get some doe rabbits so the community won’t die out.

In every one of these cases, one or a few make a sacrifice of themselves on behalf of the many, a sacrifice that brings them to the very jaws of death. As Christopher Vogler notes in The Writer’s Journey:Mythic Structure for Storytellers & Screenwriters, a Hero is “someone who is willing to sacrifice his own needs on behalf of others, like a shepherd who will sacrifice to protect and serve his flock.” Vogler doesn’t spell it out, but of course this remark is an allusion to John 10:10-11...describing, in my mind, the Source of all genuine heroism.

“One who sacrifices himself for others” is a fairly broad and simple description, and the stories to be told are near-infinite. “Hero” is one of what Jung calls “Archetypes” in his theory of the collective unconscious; those ideas are further developed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Christopher Vogler in turn has applied these ideas to modern storytelling.

Interestingly, if you look at the three examples above, you’ll notice that the heroes are each quite different. They are marked as heroes by their actions, but they are all of different character types. Spider-Man is what is sometimes called an anti-hero—indeed he was one of the first in modern comics—a neurotic loner, an outsider, a wimpy teenager suddenly given amazing powers. King Leonidas and his 300, on the other hand were born and bred to be heroes; the weak and deformed of Sparta have been weeded out by ruthless infanticide, and these 300 are the pick of the surviving crop, trained harshly from childhood.

Hazel is perhaps the least likely hero of all—he lacks any very distinguishing characteristics, and it is other rabbits in his band who supply size and strength, supernatural knowledge, and outstanding cleverness. But Hazel is the one who holds them together with farsightedness, good sense, and above all with his courage in going ahead of them to run their risks for them “like El-ahrairah”, the rabbit folk hero whose stories they admire.

There are so many heroes in the stories of the world—because we all need heroes, and really, American Idol and Superbowl winners just don’t cut it. And there are also many kinds of heroes....because, likely or not, we all need to know that we can be heroes too.