The Hero, Part 1

The hero makes the big decisions.

Hero refers to the main character of a story.

Hero refers to a sandwich.

Hero refers to a person willing to endure sacrifice for the benefit of the group.

When I use the term hero, I’m talking about the main character of a story.

I have to clarify this because often my students equate hero with superhero. They also think hero means a perfect person or a heroic individual, a goody-two shoes or, as they say, a Mary Sue, someone too perfect to be interesting or relatable. That’s not how I use the term hero.

Hero is a broader category than superhero. A superhero can be a hero, but a superhero does not have to be the hero of the story. In the Marvel ensemble movies, the heroes of the story are typically Iron Man and/or Captain America. (My students are experts on these movies; I’m doing my best.) Their decisions drive the stories. But they are not the only superheroes in the story.

Similarly, Danny Ocean is the hero of Ocean’s Eleven (2001). There’s an ensemble cast of great characters, but Danny is the one who makes the decisions that drive the story. It’s his plan to rob the casinos. He puts together the team and persuades the others to go along. He also wants it more than any other character and for reasons more personal and primal than any other character.

Hero refers to the function of the main character in a story. The main character’s function is to make the dramatic decisions that drive the story.

The hero makes two main dramatic decisions: one to move into the second act; the other to move into the final act. 

To move from Act 1 to Act 2, the hero chooses to get on the ship, go on the journey, accept the mission, enter into a relationship, or trespass into unknown territory. A hero can also let in a stranger, challenge a god, invite disaster, or make a reckless wish. 

If the hero does not make this choice, the story stops. There is no Act 2. There is no adventure. There’s just . . . waiting.

I recently read a legal thriller, The Judge’s List (2021) by John Grisham, and while I enjoyed the book, the main character resisted taking the case for the first 130 pages of a 360-page book. Yowza. She really didn’t want to go on this adventure.

I’ve also seen movies where the hero takes forever to commit to the adventure. While I was watching the fourth installment of the Matrix movies, The Matrix: Resurrections (2021), I think I noted that Neo committed to his adventure about fifty minutes into a two-and-a-half-hour movie. That’s a long time to wait for Neo to take the red pill, and I felt it.

You may read stories featuring passive heroes. 

In certain novels, we seem to be following this one character quite closely. However, this person isn’t making any decisions. They’re passive. They’re not acting; they’re reacting. Other people are pushing them or pulling them or forcing them or commanding them. 

I once taught The House of the Scorpion (2002) to seventh-graders, but the hero was passive and did not make the dramatic choice to enter the adventure of the second act. The hero of The Giver (1993) is also close to passive because rather than making a choice on his own, he does what The Giver tells him to do. I recently finished a Scott Turow novel, Identical (2013), and there isn’t one main character. Instead, the functions of the hero, in this novel, have been divided among several characters. 

All kinds of stories exist, of course, and we’re talking function here. What is the function of the hero? The function of the hero is to make the dramatic decisions that drive the story forward. We’re not talking about laws for which straying writers will be arrested. Some writers write stories in which a hero is passive or in which several characters perform the function of the hero. The function of the hero remains the same, regardless of how many stories play with variations.

A hero is also a sandwich, and you know how many variations of the sandwich there are! 

Just FYI, I taught Alan Gratz’s Refugee (2017), and his heroes — all children — make active dramatic choices. It’s a good book to teach in middle school.

That was a digression. Let’s get back to the hero’s first function: to enter the adventure of the second act.

If you’re watching a movie or reading a novel, you can identify who the hero is by noting which character makes this first important dramatic choice. 

Who makes the big choice to go somewhere or do something?

I teach The Scarlet Letter and Of Mice & Men to eighth-graders. I always ask them this question with these two novels because finding the hero is a bit tricky.

In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne makes a subtle choice. She’s a pillar of resilience and strength who endures abuse from her community. She’s not an action hero. She’s a moral hero. And her decision that moves the story from the first act to the second act is her decision to keep a secret with a disguised Arthur Dimmesdale, her cowardly husband (ugh, this guy). Their agreement is basically “I won’t tell your secret if you won’t tell mine.” This bond of shared secrecy drives the novel forward, and the revelation of these secrets drives the finale of the novel.

For many years, I taught The Scarlet Letter in eighth grade, and I would diagram the acts of the novel on the whiteboard. It’s cartoonish, but it helped orient the students as we waded through the dense prose.

In Of Mice & Men, there are only two characters to choose from, but they are both reactive in the early chapter. They’re on the run. They’re also a bit hard to figure out. Neither is intelligent or particularly admirable. One seems big and goofy, and the other seems small and whiny. If you’re a reader and looking for someone to fit a heroic mold (big, strong, kind), you might pick Lenny over George because George seems small, weak, and mean. But the hero in a story performs a function, and that function is to make the decision to enter the second act. And so that’s George. George wants to get jobs at the nearby ranch, and so off they go.

Notice George’s setup desire and his life dream here. His setup desire is to get jobs at the ranch. His life dream is the American Dream: to own land. They want to work at the ranch to earn money to buy land. George’s life dream gives meaning to his setup desire.

For that matter, notice Hester Prynne’s setup desire and life dream. Her setup desire is to keep the secret of her lover to protect him. Her life dream is to unite with him and have a family. Again, her life dream gives meaning to her setup desire.

Note, finally, the nature of these life dreams: love, family, a home of one’s own. They are desires nearly everyone has felt . . . and felt deeply.

The hero also makes the second big dramatic decision to enter the final act.

Hester Prynne wants to reveal the secrets. It’s her choice, not anyone else’s. She’s the one who chose to keep these secrets, so she has to be the one to reveal them and take control of her life.

George wants to assume responsibility for Lenny. He doesn’t want anyone else to punish Lenny or make any decisions about Lenny’s fate. It was George’s decision to lead Lenny into this new ranch that even Lenny knew was going to be trouble. Lenny had a bad feeling. George ignored him. And now George has to admit, finally, that he made a mistake in believing Lenny could change. 

Danny Ocean is the one who got them into this casino heist. So he’s the one who has to have the plan to get them out of the tight spot. He didn’t tell his crew about Julia Roberts. So he has to suck it up and get past it.

And in the original Matrix movie, Neo is the one who chose to enter the real world of the second act, and in the final act, he’s the one who has to choose to enter the Matrix to save Morpheus. 

Note the symmetry of these dramatic decisions. 

Hester Prynne keeps a secret to enter the second act . . . and reveals the secret to enter the final act. 

George trusts Lenny to behave himself at the new ranch (in the second act) . . . and assumes responsibility for Lenny in the final act.

Neo trusts Morpheus to guide him to the truth about the real world of the second act . . . and, in the final act, asks others to trust him as he enters the Matrix to save Morpheus.

Both dramatic decisions are necessary for the story. In the first decision, the hero makes the choice that begins the Act 2 story. In the second decision, the hero makes the choice to leave that story and enter the final act in which they apply what they’ve learned, prove themselves, and grow.

The hero transforms by the end of the story.

And you can’t change unless you make decisions, commit to those decisions, take action, accept setbacks, accept responsibility for your actions, keep going, learn from your mistakes, adapt, and fight to the end. 

The hero grows in a story, and so the hero must make these important decisions. 

You can’t grow unless you make the big decisions.