Defining the Hero: Form

Abstract

In his book The Heroic Ideal in American Literature (1971), Theodore Gross writes:

Yet it is not an idle phrase, the American Dream… It reflects our romanticism and our sentimentality; our energetic chauvinism and our parochialism; our idealism and our authority; our hungry need for heroism. (vii)

This hunger for the heroic has long been a defining feature of American literature as much as the American Dream with its tantalizing carrot of social success. Yet as Irving Howe points out in “Anarchy and Authority in American Literature” (1967) the American imagination also seeks to push away. The American imagination is anarchistic and searches for a place outside of restrictive society to reinvent a smaller, more manageable society that is more compatible with the characteristics of the individual hero. In other words, instead of fighting from the inside, utopia is to be found by “lighting out for the territories.” From Huck Finn to Augie March, American heroes have longed to fill the tempting blank spaces of an unexplored continent.