The Incompetent Hero Proves His Worth

DON QUIXOTE is foolish, ineffectual, and more than a little
mad. Achilles is brave, fierce in battle, and boastful. Hamlet
is cruel and destructive. King Lear is garrulous, vain
and proud. Juliet is beautiful, innocent and in love. Gargantua
is lustful, obscene, and exhibitionistic.
These characters have neither vices nor virtues in common
with each other, and yet most readers find them all
highly sympathetic. If a character attracts or repels because
of his attribtues, how can it be that valor and cynicism
in one character and timidity and sentimentality in
another character will equally intrigue a reader and capture
his wholehearted sympathy?
The paradox is easily explained. Although a reader will
love or despise a fictional personality because of his actions
and qualities, these actions and qualities take on different
meanings in different fictional environments. A practical,
hard-headed man like Achilles would be a dolt in the
world of Romeo and Juliet; Don Quixote, an intolerable
fool in the Iliad; Juliet would seem prissy in Gargantua
and Pantegruel; Lear would emerge as grotesque a personality
as Polonius if he were to walk on stage in Hamlet
None of these characters would qualify as heroes in these
transformed contexts.
The "sympatheticness" of one or more characters seems
to be the second most important quality in popular fiction.
Suspense is the first and always indispensable. The presence
of one or more sympathetic personalities is necessary
to the success of ninety-nine out of every hundred slick
stories. (What a few allowable exceptions there are to this
general rule will be dealt with in their place.)
The extreme characteristics of such different heroes as
Achilles and Gargantua were pointed out to show that
gaining sympathy for a fictional personality is far from a
cut-and-dried business. The one thing most heroes and
heroines hold in common is the fact that they have been
strongly differentiated from all the other people in their
story worlds. Juliet has a sentimental passion in a world
of lust and strife. Don Quixote is superlatively gallant in
a prosaic work-a-day milieu. Achilles is the best warrior
among the Greeks.
This differentiation has been almost universally the case
in the literature of the past. The common, ordinary man
was not thought interesting enough to write about. A
complete reversal was ushered in in the nineteenth century,
so that today most "quality" fiction devotes itself to
a portrayal of the typical rather than the atypical character.
James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus was meant not as a port
rait of an artist as much as of the artist. Molly Bloom was
as much an investigation of womankind, according to
Joyce's lights, as of any particular woman. Leopold Bloom,
of course, was Everyman. The difference stands out nicely
if we consider the book on which Joyce patterned Ulysses.
The original of Mr. Bloom was Odysseus, the hero of the
Odyssey, and probably no more extraordinary man ex.
isted in the Greek fictional world. His courage, ingenuity,
tenacity, long-suffering, and his remarkable adventures all
separated him sharply from the crowd.
The Everyman of today's "quality" literature is rarely
genuinely sympathetic—that is, worthy of emulation. The
sympathy he inspires is more often a kind of self-pity in
the reader. In fact, he is quite often not sympathetic at
all—merely interesting.
This, it seems, is one of the major differences between
today's popular and "quality" fiction. As in classical literature,
most heroes of current popular fiction continue to
stand out from the crowd, either by virtue of their personalities
or their problems.
Now, although sympathy can be stirred up for your hero
in an infinite variety of ways—often in opposing ways—it is
still a tricky business, and doubly tricky in slick stories
dealing with incompetent heroes. Sympathy came into the
discussion of incompetent-hero stories because the sympathy
here always hinges on the actual inadequacy of the
hero. In other popular-fiction story-types there is not necessarily
a connection between sympathy and the hero's
problem. A hero may be sympathetic because he is a nice
guy; but his problem may be climbing a mountain.
A hard-working Seabee battalion during the last war is
building an airstrip on a Pacific island for the Navy. One of
the Seabees is a very strange fellow. He has no mechanical
ability whatever, and he cannot carry out even the simplest
orders. It is not that he is ill willed or stupid, but that he
seems to be living on an entirely different plane from the rest
of the company. He does possess, though, one extraordinary
talent: he knows intimately the ways of the wild animals on
the island. In fact, he seems even able to communicate with
them.
One day he and the narrator of the story, another Seabee,
go off into the jungle to observe a colony of monkeys. When
they arrive at the spot, they are attacked by a group of holdout
Japs. The narrator is wounded, and the Japs are closing
in for the kill when the dreamer calls to the monkeys for
help. The monkeys counterattack and rout the Japs. The
two Seabees are saved. The incompetent has proved his worth,
even militarily.
Consider the qualities that make this hero sympathetic,
because his particular inadequacy appears over and over
again in all kinds of literature. He is a dreamer—inarticulate,
good-natured, pleasantly inscrutable. First, these qualities
are thrown into strong contrast by placing him among
a hard-boiled bunch of service men who are taken up with
concrete, practical business. If the dreamer's failings had
ever so much as a touch of malevolence about them or had
In any way constituted a distinct liability to the group's
cause, he would not have stimulated the reader's sympa
thy. Obvious? Yes, but perhaps only by hindsight. An author
writing about a real situation or an actual case out of
his personal history could very easily be misled by the
facts into introducing such dissonant tones.
Folk literature is full of stories about seeming incompetents
who prove their worth. Take Cinderella. Why does
the reader's heart immediately go out to her? Because she
is beautiful, more beautiful than her self-indulgent stepsisters?
Because she must scrub floors and bear with the
contempt of her inferiors? Not at all. It is the innocent acceptance
of these injustices that endears her to the readers.
An ambitious, vindictive, and ill-willed schemer, although
she was just as cruelly treated and just as deserving of a
better status, would arouse the reader's interest because
she had a problem—but not necessarily his sympathy.
The head nun and a doctor in a hospital are discussing a
young nurse. They feel she is a very nice young woman but
just does not have the stuff to make a good nurse. Later in
the day, the doctor assigns the young nurse to a tetanus case
because the patient's chances of survival are almost nil.
Nothing much can be done for him. The nurse, though, simply
by her presence and her innate warmth inspires the patient
with the will to recover. With his new interest in living, the
patient miraculously gets well, and subsequently proposes
marriage to the nurse. When she announces her resignation,
there is a cute closing scene in which the head nun and the
doctor bewail the fact that it is always their most promising
nurse who leaves to get married.
Now consider something of the same situation in which
a director and producer, having seen a certain young
actress do her stuff, decide that she does not have sufficient
t
alent to make the grade. The producer and director may
have seemed just as stuffy as the nun and doctor, but the
young actress would not have received the same immediate
sympathy the young nurse did. Why? There is a delicate
difference. Nursing is largely a thankless business, fine for
women not primarily motivated by a desire for wealth and
recognition. Acting in Hollywood is, in the mass mind, precisely
the opposite kind of profession. Sympathy is a cornmodity
of which the reader has infinite quantities, but he
will not hand it out just for the asking.
When the incompetent-hero story is told by someone
within the story framework, the hero is very often a "character"
in the slang sense of the word. But when an incompetent
hero tells the story about himself his inadequacy is
usually due to a lack of insight on the part of the story's
other characters.
"I" have just passed my eighth birthday and have wheedled
my mother into letting me cross streets by myself—a big social
step in my town, a definite sign of maturity. One day, I go to
a nearby lot and try to wangle my way into a game of baseball
with two older boys. They let me play, but only to have
someone to chase the balls they hit into the field. When my
turn to bat comes they decide it is time to go off and see the
pro baseball game at the town's stadium. There they have a
hidden knothole waiting for them which they alternate in
using and which they do not let me look through. Soon, thr
still older boys come along and appropriate the hole for .
themselves. In return, they tell us of a "crawling" hole on the
other side of the stadium which is too small for any of them
to use. We find the hole, but neither of my companions is
small enough to fit through. I can, though, and, once inside,
surreptitiously open an exit door for my friends. We all see
the game, and my companions subsequently accept me as their
equal.
These plot-lines into which we are separating current
popular fiction are necessarily quite basic and bald. And
the stories selected to describe them are those that seem
the clearest and cleanest examples of the type. Very often a
story will combine two of these plot-lines, as is frequently
the case with stories that contain a love interest. And then,
quite often, too, the mechanics of a tale are so vivid that
the plot-line, whatever it may be, is relatively
inconsequential.
An interesting incompetent-hero tale of this nature concerns
a crack-pot inventor who, while puttering around with various
projects, is living off the proceeds of his wife's turkey farm. He
discovers, one day, a very powerful fuel and decides to invent
a rocket ship which can use this fuel and which will carry
him into outer space. He builds a contraption which no one
expects to leave the ground. It does, though, and takes the
inventor with his supplies for quite a ride. But to the inventor's
amazement his trip comes to an end in what looks
like his own back yard. His calculations had led him to believe
that he was landing in another world. But everything seems
the same. His wife is there to meet him. His neighbors are all
recognizable.
One thing, though: none of the people in this
world he has landed on seem to know what a potato is. By
raising a crop of potatoes from the stock he brought on his
rocket ship he tries to prove that he actually has come from
another world exactly like this world while a man that looked
like him left this world just when he left the other. No one
believes him, of course, although they do give him much
credit for developing the potato.
The "snapper" is the hero's consideration that he is living
in cosmic sin with another man's wife, and his real
wife is living with another man she thinks to be him.
category:plot lines