Qualities and representation of the heroes in different novels
Introduction
The study that represents the figure of the hero seems to the naked eye an easy task and, nevertheless, it is not at all. Drae’s definition links it to "ancient pagans" and makes him the son of a god or a goddess and his loves with a human being. But it also gives you prestige and integrity and makes it a prominent character in the epic. He is, therefore, a special being not compared to normal men who populate the real world. In the classical tradition, the hero has other attributes or links; among them the linking of him with the wars, with the virtues of heroism and the historical and symbolic properties; He is an exemplary figure.
Developing
If, in general, the novel in democracy in Spain should question ourselves about the convenience of designating the characters as heroes or antiheroes, reflecting on the validity without reservations of the synonymy of the main character and hero, and in any case, Specify and systematize the use of the term in the current fiction of the Spanish language. The figure of the hero is protein as myth and has been adapted to society and the spiritual needs that each era required because, according to the postulates of psychology, all symbols from mythology.
That is to say of the origin of the hero, they are products of the psyche and, therefore, men are carriers of them. Freud Jung and his followers "have irrefutably demonstrated from logic, the heroes and exploits of the myth survive in modern times and manifest themselves in dreams" (Campbell). If in antiquity the heroes meant the ability of man to fight against the gods and the negative evidence of life, reaffirming in reading their value, in the seventeenth century, for example, Baltasar Gracián promised in the prologue in the hero.
Offer the reader a heroic male who gathered a series of qualities such as prudence, sagacity, and belicosity; He should also be a philosopher and good politician. As historical examples he cited Seneca, Aesop, Aristotle, and Tacitus. That is a hero built with the qualities that the baroque aspired. In the nineteenth century, historian Thomas Carlyle thought that a hero must have a glow that communicates with the souls "a feeling of cordiality towards all things", advocated himself the "cult of the heroes" and from the beginning he valued An essential quality that attributed to Odin: the intervention of the runes.
The Scandinavian alphabet and poetry. Thus, a Scandinavian mythology is already a heroic god as a maker of literature, a poet, a writer, an idea, on the other hand, intimately related to the promising conception of the related romanticism. We find the union between myth, literature, and the function of the benign and collaborator of humans for the benefit of these, and on which I will deal again in Ignacio Martínez de Pisón’s novel, bury the dead. In our day we should ask ourselves what a hero is.
And if we want to face the factual absence of them we must refer to the famous words of Nietzsche in Zaratustra: "Dead are the gods", with which the philosopher refers to the destruction of the traditional and mythical cycles that had existed until the arrival of the progress and industrialization of society, to which we must add the influence of the research and development of the sciences that, as Campbell says, “have transformed human life in such a way that the timeless universe of symbols long ago dice has suffered a collapse."
Since the second half of the nineteenth century, when in literature it arose after romanticism the figure of the antihero had been consecrated, life for the human being has changed so much that God and religion, associated with this policy and propaganda of it, They are not supports of the world; As a consequence, the traditional values that the heroes carried and only have weighed, according to Campbell “the patriots whose photographs can be seen everywhere-survey as official idols” and adds: “The first task of the hero is to overcome them”.
It is also a long and deep process that runs through literature and we just have to look at the characters, which polulates, for example, in the novels of the last century, to which José Belmonte Serrano calls "tired heroes" (Pérez-Reverte), because they are marked by a skeptical and nothing optimistic vision of the world; that is, they are the antiheroes, the main protagonists. The modern novel has broken, together with the society and psychology of its competent, with the glorious hero, and we must quote Campbell again when he says:
He has dedicated himself to making a courageous and exact action of the diffuse, sick and broken figures that swarm before us, around us and to us, where the natural impulse of protesting against the Holocaust has been repressed, to proclaim the faults or announce The panaceas, has found the magnificence of a more powerful classic art for us than Greek art: realistic, intimate and interesting tragedy from several aspects, of democracy, where the God crucified with his lacerated face and broken in catastrophes is shown Not only from the house but of the most common homes.
The link between the spiritual and phatic aspect has been broken, between the hero as the incarnation of God and his function on earth as a social, community and human being in our day. The positivism society is global, without border, its pragmatic ideals. It lacks meaning has become an ergonomic-political organism exclusively, secular, material, in E, that traditional culture and all its decadent symbols, leftover. And this society cannot save or generate a hero because in which he should guide and save her.
In this society in which “it does not seem so strange that today it can be judged with some malice to the one who still struggles for the transcendental ideals of him, for dreams of difficult reach.”Says Rafael Cózar. And in the same way, it creates a literature inhabited by characters lacking morals and values, evil, economic winners in their world of fiction but more attractive to the reader, and therefore, from an economic point of view, much more Interesting. However, despite the panorama presented by sociology and psychology.
A great nostalgia is perceived in our society and search for both real and fictitious characters. You just have to look at the fantastic types of comic, children’s drawings and children extraterrestrial invasions, to name a few; Fantastic heroes themselves in wonderful and virtual worlds. But it is also evidenced in the interest and study of the subject in subjects such as philosophy, psychology, narrative, etc.
Likewise in the multiple pages that the general issue on the Internet, where you can find such diverse examples as Ronald Reagan, José María Aznar, the Formula 1 Corridor Fernando Alonso or the defeated candidate for the presidency of the United States McCain, to appoint some , nominated and presented as such. That is, today’s society nostalgically seeks heroes and finds them and selects them from those that usually appear in the media. In any case, these photography characters surrounded by flags correspond to the official idols presented above Campbell.
On the page they follow they will be questioned that they owe behaviors such as Miralles in the novel Soldados de Salamina John two steps to bury the dead; What function they try to have in our society when through them a pulse is maintained between the heroes officially that they have been or are and they, to look at them where they look at them, are only characters, -The fictional/real character Of them it lacks importance- that at a time of their life they followed a path that in ancient societies and literatures would have been marked and presented as heroic.
conclusion
You might think that the primary hero of our society is one that contrasts with the figure of the public or political hero. And in the way the two novels mentioned above, emblematic examples of dosing literature, respond to a reflection on the hero’s character and oppose an official heroic entity and therefore vulnerable to being taken as such in our society. Finally, I will stop at Captain Alatriste, by Pérez Reverte for being a historical model, perfectly characterized to be in the collective imaginary of the readers, but especially for the use of the term hero that the Carthaginian writer theoretically develops in interviews and writings In his narrative.
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