Stevenson & Joyce
Unlikely Heroes
While there are many stories that contain clear-cut protagonists and antagonists, there are an equal number, if not more, that do not. Moreover, despite the fact that it can be easy to identify the main character of a story, deciding whether they deserve the title of hero or villain is not always as easy. Through most of literary history, writers have given readers a traditional hero; one who tends to do battle against the forces of evil. This is usually represented through physical or intellectual battle with a person (the villain) other than himself or herself. For many readers, the words hero and protagonist are interchangeable, both are the main character and both are the good guys' fighting against the bad guys,' the antagonist or villain, terms which are also interchangeable. During the end of the Victorian era, represented in this essay by Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the beginnings of modern fiction, represented in this essay by James Joyce's The Dead, there is an abundance of writings in which the line between protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain, becomes ambiguous and the main character is not always a hero in the traditional sense. These authors do not always give their readers clear battles between good and evil, their heroes often fight with themselves rather than an outside foe, and they usually struggle with seemingly ordinary situations/emotions as opposed to villainous figures or deadly creatures.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde presents numerous problems for the reader trying to identify the protagonist in that the first character in the title, Dr. Jekyll, can only sometimes be categorized as a hero, while the second, Mr. Hyde (ultimately Dr. Jekyll's alter-ego), is certainly not a hero. However, a character does not have to be in the title to rank the status of hero, which is good for this novella, because the true hero is in fact...
Please login to view the full essay...