It’s been a good century since I posted on here. I wrote a nice little piece on heroism for a class assignment that I felt like sharing. Give it a read!
“The capacity for violence defines how far a hero is willing to go to achieve his goals. Samson, for example, outright declared a one-man war on the Philistines because he was denied the wife he coveted. His primary goal was revenge, his initial goal was a wife, and the consequence was a lot of dead bodies piled up in places where they shouldn’t have been. I’d argue that Samson isn’t a hero until he becomes a martyr at his death. Up until then he acted impulsively, regularly lost his temper to the point of calling out his God, and let his emotions and lust control him all throughout his life. Samson’s violence was never required- for example, he could have sought another wife instead of killing 30 men in Ashkelon. But it was violence that drove Samson to crush the Philistines and himself, and thus in this story violence was essential to his heroism.
David lived in a time where warfare was essential to climbing the social ladder. If you talked big and made grand speeches but didn’t have skulls on your belt, you weren’t a hero; you were a storyteller. In this age of total war, it would make sense that David would have to prove himself on the battlefield to become a great hero. If he had stayed a shepherd boy all his life, he never would have become a hero. It was his conflicts with Saul and the Philistines that molded him into a heroic man, and while conflict and violence often go hand in hand, David’s conflicts were not always violent. His conflict with Saul, for example, only turned violent when Saul tried to shishkebab him like a cheap piece of meat (1 Samuel 18:11). Violence was necessary to overthrow the Philistine giant Goliath, but violence was not necessary to unite the divided 12 tribes of Israel (2 Samuel 5:1-3).
So then, is violence really necessary to become a hero? No. Conflict is.
While conflict often leads to violence, it doesn’t always have to. Take the TV dramas of the modern age where conflict is shown, not on the battlefield, but in relationships, in the struggle against nature and love, in the fight of a man against himself. It’s very hard to find a story these days that isn’t tempered with violence; it’s almost impossible to find a story that isn’t rich with conflict. You can have conflict without violence, though I’d argue that the absence of violence detracts from the heroism of the main character. A character like Walter White or Frank Underwood, for example, is much more of a hero than someone from a slice-of-life dramedy. Undeniably both were violent individuals on a different plane of heroism than a dramedy hero, but to refrain from calling the dramedy actor a hero outright ignores a story’s conflict.
It can then be said that violence doesn’t make a hero- conflict makes a hero. Violence is an easy out to cheap heroism often exploited by people who don’t know why their characters are heroes at the end of the story. It’s the conflict, not the violence, that makes a hero. It’s the loss of friends, of family, of insurmountable odds and hitting rock bottom, of being destroyed completely down to your soul and still having the stones to get up and keep fighting back; that’s what makes a hero.”
I’ll probably come back and edit this later, but for now I just want to get it out there. Cheers! Yes, Triumph of Heroes book 3 is still under way, as is another pet project of mine. I’m doing my best to balance things but it’s not going as well as I want it to. The future is full of surprises.
Until next time!
~Samuel Knight
Sam Knight, Author 