Some time back, I wrote of Books That Changed My Life, and, along the same lines, yesterday I happened upon a post on The Guardian web site concerning Literary Heroes and our inability to choose them. While I’ve posted the link to that article, I’m not at all sure I agree with the premise. In other words, I feel that in many ways, we do choose our heroes, and especially our heroes from literature—at least one sort.
Heroes take many forms both in real life and in literature. For instance, one could choose Helen Keller as a hero if one were to define hero to be a person who overcomes great odds. In literature, surely Ivan Denisovitch was a hero, to name one of thousands that could come to mind. But those are not the sorts of heroes I’m thinking of right now. Rather, I’m focusing on those books we’ve all read where we’re so immersed in the characters that they become good friends, friends who, for one reason or another, we looked up to, who showed us a new way of being, who, for however short a time, we actually sought to become—or at least we sought to emulate the traits that thrilled us most.
As a child, and still to some degree, I sought escape in the novels I read. The books I loved the most were the books whose heroes I could seek to emulate. I remember spending one summer dreaming of floating down a river with Huck Finn; I wore shorts, never shoes, socks, or shirt, and even found an old straw hat my parents hated to a pint that they threw it out and then claimed I must have misplaced it. Davy Crockett and Johnny Tremain received similar treatment—I must have been into hats.
My teens were spent as Holden Caulfield; as a young adult I was closer to Nick Carraway, but longed to be Jay Gatsby. I recognized myself in Chabon’s Art Bechstein, but tried to be his Cleveland. There are many others, but I think you get the point.
Literary heroes matter. Like it or not, part of who I am—part of who every reader is—comes from the books I have read and the characters I have imagined. As a writer, I borrow this and that from what I’ve witnessed or lived through. As a reader, I steal.
November 13th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Yes, yes, and more yes. My life is a composite of literary heroes, people I admire, respect, and want to cling to. My first, an perhaps an unlikely choice, Diggory Vinn in “The Return of the Native.” And Edmund Rochester, of course, the precursor of the chronic depressive, right out of the DSM. And Darcy, in “Price and Prejudice,” a most misunderstood hero of the dear and great Austen. And a much neglected fine hero, Lewis Elliot in the now neglected C.P.Snow series “Strangers and Brothers,” a normal man living a normal life in normal times. One could do worse than that in finding a hero– a good man trying to live a decent life.