these wrongs don't make a Wright

                For all his vices, Adam Mansbach has certainly done his research: Angry Black White Boy is dripping with obscure hip-hop references, Macon flaunts his ability to name-drop black nationalists and his knowledge of five-percenter philosophy, and it’s all underpinned with what seems to be a comprehensive understanding of the historical circumstances that shaped American race relations into what they are today. In all of this, the black literary canon isn’t left out: there are references, allusions, and even parallel scenes relating to many of those influential works. It’s clear Mansbach knows his stuff. Which makes it even more incomprehensible why he and his publishers would think it was a good idea to include a review saying “Adam Mansbach is the white Richard Wright, and Angry Black White Boy is our generation’s Native Son” prominently featured on the back cover of this novel.
                 In general, it’s pretty pretentious to compare yourself to another author whose works are still read and studied almost 80 years after they were published when your own book lacks even a Sparknotes summary (much to the chagrin of us all. RIP my quiz grades again), but what’s even more audacious is that in this novel Mansbach seems to be purposefully and visibly trying to evoke references from Richard Wright's Native Son and other iconic works by black authors. Macon finds himself in a jail cell, just like Bigger Thomas (although unlike Bigger he knows he can easily escape and has no life-changing revelation). Like the nameless narrator of Invisible Man, he makes a foray into trying to organize for social change by visiting the black student union like the narrator did with the Brotherhood. There are more echoes of Invisible Man, too, with Macon holed up in his room ruminating on Fleet Walker and trying to figure out his own place in the world, and the novel’s structure where we get the preliminary note that ambiguously gives some details about the ending; we’ll see as the novel finishes whether the ending structure is similar as well.
                Of all these references, the most infuriating similarity is between this novel and Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle. The White Boy Shuffle began with Gunnar’s letter to the nation detailing the planned mass suicide; in that context it was an interesting twist on Invisible Man’s opening chapter, where we also get an unexplainable view of the narrator’s ending situation and the rest of the novel serves to justify how he got there. In Angry Black White Boy, we also get a letter to begin, but as a rhetorical device it’s a lot less convincing when it’s being used a third time and when, unlike the other two characters, the Macon who’d write that letter is immediately recognizable from the very first chapter. The two novels’ main characters, Macon and Gunnar Kaufman, are uncannily similar; both are (approximately) 2000s-era teenagers sulking around big cities with the Rodney King riots as pivotal moments in their lives, both attend a prestigious college but rapidly become disillusioned by it, rebel against their tacitly racist family backgrounds, and decide on drastic measures to solve the problem. By the end, The White Boy Shuffle rapidly flies into insanity, and the farther we get into Angry Black White Boy the more the rhythm of the plot seems as if it's heading in the  same direction. 
                  But by far the most egregious thing about this is the narrative voice. Gunnar's narration, spiked with poetry and hilarious insights, was in my opinion one of the best parts of reading The White Boy Shuffle, and Angry White Black Boy seems like it’s trying to piggyback on exactly the same thing, in exactly the same style. Maybe it's symbolic that Gunnar Kaufman uses his graffiti skills to spread poetry and enlightened social consciousness, while Macon spent eight years perfecting how to write his name, because it seems a lot like that's what's happening with these two novels as well. The style of narration in The White Boy Shuffle has an undeniable purpose: the jokes in the text are carefully calibrated satire that makes you simultaneously laugh and reconsider your racial ideas, the soundtrack of rap, jazz, and beatnik poetry serve as part of Beatty's semi-critique of hip-hop culture, while at the same time exploring the influence of those art forms on American society, and Gunnar himself is a character that forces the reader to confront their own role as consumers of the novel. In Angry Black White Boy, there are versions of all of these elements, but the main purpose is no lofty societal critique, but instead, to assure the reader that Mansbach is enough of an authority on black culture to be trusted to write a novel about it. Just like Macon perfecting his tag, maybe Mansbach is successful in fluidly regaling us with black nationalist philosophy, but in contrast to Beatty, it's hard to see what literary value it holds besides being a spray-painted Mansbach insignia on top of other artists' work.
                 I guess the thing about this book that annoys me is I just can’t understand why Mansbach thought it was necessary to write it, and especially, why he chose to so blatantly try to position himself in the tradition of black writers before him in doing so. In African-American Lit last semester, one of the most interesting aspects, to me, was how each of the novels we read built on the one before it, with references and allusions that took the same recurring themes and looked at them from new directions. All of these novels worked together in conversation to create a narrative that articulated a wide variety of the experiences of black people facing racism and oppression. Judging from my own experiences, I would probably agree with Mansbach in saying most white people, (including myself before that class, and now still), could learn a lot by understanding those novels. But learning about black literature as a white person is very different from writing a novel as a white person that inserts itself into that tradition, and this is where I think that Mansbach goes too far. Maybe the fact that he’s at least trying is, like Macon’s antics, somewhat admirable, and maybe Macon as a character raises some fascinating questions that should be addressed. But I think if you’re a white guy writing a race novel, you shouldn’t pretend to be anything but a white guy writing a race novel. Make yourself this generation’s Mansbach, if you’re so inclined, create a new genre of literature miraculously crafted to strip white people of our every prejudice with a single reading --- but Wright's already taken. And writing a novel whose every sentence clangs like a cheap imitation of Gunnar Kaufman's poetry and overflows with references overheard by eavesdropping on Ellison and Wright himself, seems at best, ignorant, and at worst, the twenty-first-century iteration of Jan’s well-intentioned screwups that threw Bigger Thomas under the bus in the first place.

media res

In the discussions of this novel recently, one of the topics that kept coming up was the role of the media in the novel, and whether or not we as readers are inevitably playing a similar role. Of all the subtle social critiques embedded in this novel, I think this is the most hilariously ironic one: Donoghue must have known that most people who read this book would be lured in by the tantalizing plot descriptions and probably didn’t want to admit it to themselves. For our situation in this class that particular aspect might not seem to be as applicable, since were assigned to read this book, rather than choosing it out of lurid curiosity, but there are still many ways Donoghue tries to get the reader to contemplate their role as consumers of the story as they’re reading it.  

From the beginning, the reader is strongly allied with Ma and Jack. We get a first-hand view of Ma’s incredible success at raising him in impossible circumstances, and after so long with constant details of their captivity, it’s hard not to bristle at every poorly-thought-out remark or insensitive question Ma and Jack encounter after escaping Room. A reporter with a way to critique Ma’s parenting technique might make for a juicy story but the reader realizes that, as Ma says, they “don’t know the first thing about it.” It’s an uncomfortable revelation for the reader since we’ve all undoubtedly been the consumers of these types of sensationalist stories from the media without really considering the implications for the people involved.

I find Donoghue’s way of using the media to make the reader critique their own actions especially interesting because it reminds me of The White Boy Shuffle that some people read in African American Lit this fall. The basic idea of that book, for people who weren’t in that class, is that Gunnar Kaufman is a genius poet and basketball player who ends up so frustrated with white people that he ends up facilitating a vast suicide plot with all the other black people in America. The sly part of the book is that Gunnar is especially frustrated with how the white people enjoy reading his poetry and watching him play basketball, but don’t value him as a person; and the reader, by the end of the book, is forced to confront the question of whether they, too, are only interested in Gunnar for his life’s entertainment value rather than seeing him as an actual person. In this way, the white world looking at Gunnar is really similar to the media’s fascination with Ma and Jack.

Obviously this is kind of a flawed analogy because Gunnar’s struggle against systematic oppression is very different from Ma and Jack’s experience with the media exploiting their story, but it is just interesting to me how there are a lot of parallels. In both situations there doesn’t really seem to be that much inherently immoral about the situation – what’s wrong with appreciating some good poetry, or a fascinating story? – and there are probably good intentions behind most of what is happening, but when you look at it from the perspective of the person it’s affecting, you realize just how dehumanizing it really is. It’s also even more complicated because there doesn’t really seem to be a simple solution: it wouldn’t be better to ignore Ma and Jack’s story completely, or to shun Gunnar Kaufman’s poetry. It’s uncomfortable, as a reader, because we all recognize ourselves doing the same thing, and by reading the novel it’s almost like we’re still doing the very action the novel is critiquing. 

jack

I will begin this blog post with a tragic, but self-inflicted, story: when I was buying all my textbooks over the summer, I completely spoiled Room for myself by reading a ton of reviews about it online (in my defense: the description of this novel on every book-purchasing website is the most suspenseful thing I’ve ever seen and really I had no choice but to try and satisfy my curiosity without actually reading the entire book itself. but I digress.). So I ended up approaching this novel with a somewhat biased and also very confused mindset, because everyone who read this book seemed to either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it. The main controversy was clearly Jack’s narration: people saw it as either charming, or infuriating; a sophisticated and nuanced view of the situation, or one that was both ineffective and utterly tone-deaf. I’m not a huge fan of chattering five-year-olds and even less a fan of books that resort to cheesy, contrived ways of seeming unique, so I was very prepared to agree with the latter of those armchair literary connoisseurs and really hate this book. But now that we’ve read almost half of the story, I think Jack’s narration is actually a very interesting and effective way of presenting this novel.

One of the main objections people seem to have is that Jack’s perception of the world makes it hard to tell what’s going on, and that because Jack is only five years old, his narration can’t properly address the emotional depth of this novel. But I think that’s a very shallow way of looking at it. Jack may see everything through a very limiting worldview, but the author also does an impressive job of letting enough clues slip through for the astute reader to get an idea of what’s really happening. The daily ritual of “Scream,” for example, is a perfectly normal part of Jack’s daily life, but for the reader it’s one of the first signs that something’s very off about this situation; when Ma and Jack decide to measure Room, another fun and innocent game for Jack, the reader becomes aware of how small their living space really is. Ma’s reactions to seemingly innocuous events, too, which Jack drops into the narrative as barely noticeable sidenotes, serve to reveal the impending danger that constantly occupies her mind.

Especially in the first few chapters, this increasingly sinister ambiguity revealed in glimpses by Jack’s blithely innocent narration makes the emotional context for the novel even more vivid, rather than diminishing it as so many angry Goodreads reviewers would make it seem. From the very beginning, the reader is forced to be in a position that’s almost the same as Jack’s. We start out with a portrait of a strange but apparently effective family arrangement, and Jack’s matter-of-fact way of narrating it makes the reader instinctively accept it without suspicion. But once the reader is aware of the actual situation, it’s almost more unnerving to look at it from Jack’s perspective than it would be to see it from Ma’s. If the reader only saw Jack’s experiences secondhand, it would be easy to dismiss Jack as just a little kid and not take the time to really understand the implications of his 11x11 foot childhood; he could easily appear to be just another obstacle to complicate Ma’s efforts at survival and escape. But instead, the reader is constantly bombarded with reminders, often in the form of Jack’s endearingly flawed syntax, that Jack’s entire consciousness is fundamentally altered by living in Room.

By the same token, I think a novel narrated by Ma could risk being too similar to countless other thrilling and heroic tales of escape. And if people think Jack’s narration is “tone-deaf,” an attempt to accurately represent Ma’s experiences through her own narrative could be even more so: what could you really do, as an author, to properly describe Ma’s emotions for the past seven years? Instead, with Jack as the narrator, only dropping an occasional hint of what Ma’s going through, the reader has to find ways to imagine for themself what Ma’s life is like. It almost forces the reader to put themselves in Ma’s position, watching Jack, to figure out how she feels, a much more emotionally intense way of understanding the situation than just reading an author’s vision of Ma’s life on the page.

Apart from how Jack’s narration wasn’t appropriate for the emotional content of the novel, the other resounding objection in the reviews was that Jack’s voice was “annoying,” and I think this concern is perhaps even more shallow and short-sighted than the others. I’m reminded of Jefferson’s journal entry in A Lesson Before Dying, and pretty much the entirety of  As I Lay Dying: both were similarly “annoying” and disorienting to read, but there were important literary reasons for that, and the unconventional narrative was a large part of what made the novel so interesting. Jack’s penchant for unnecessarily capitalized nouns and ambiguous descriptions of plot elements is confusing, but without his narrative, our understanding of this novel would be very different.

rebel rebel

In the beginning of Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying, it’s hard not to think of Grant as a sullen teenager. He avoids unpleasant conversations by retreating to his room or going on long walks; when he’s mad at his aunt, he saltily rebukes her by not eating the food she prepares for him. He is constantly frustrated and cynical about his job, his life, and the world as a whole. On some level, it’s understandable that this young, educated person working at a school with next to no resources could be, occasionally, frustrated and sullen. But the changing nature of Grant’s rebellion throughout the novel also gives important insight into his character.

At first, Grant is angry that his aunt got him involved in the situation at all. Tante Lou and Miss Emma love Jefferson, but to Grant, he is just another symbol of Grant’s failure to effect any real change in the community. Grant says, “The past twenty-one years, we’ve done all we could for Jefferson. He’s dead now. And I can’t raise the dead. All I can do is try to keep the others from ending up like this -- but he’s gone from us.” What Tante Lou and Miss Emma are asking him to do is too little, too late, and not only is it futile, but humiliating as well. When they meet with Henri Pichot to ask permission for Grant to meet with Jefferson in the jail, they have to use the servant's’ door in the back, instead of the front door as guests. Grant tells the story of how hard his aunt and Miss Emma had to work for the Pichots, to make enough money for Grant to go to college and “never go through that back door ever again.” Through the entire meeting with Pichot and, later, Grant’s meeting with him and the sheriff, the white men treat Grant as less than human and Grant is forced to go along with it to get them to allow him to see Jefferson. Grant resents Miss Emma and Tante Lou for forcing him to obey the commands of this white power structure, which he has tried so hard to escape and undermine, just to get a chance to attempt an impossible and useless task.

In Grant’s initial meetings with Jefferson, he views Jefferson in this same context, and rebels against him too. He goes through the motions to accomplish the task, but he has no idea what he’s really trying to do. Like everyone else, Grant wants to end the cycle of oppression -- but he thinks that Jefferson is past the point of no return, and by trying to “make him into a man,” he is just making a fool of himself and undermining all he hoped to achieve by getting an education. Jefferson, understandably, is even more cynical than Grant, and he seems to be aware of Grant’s attitude toward him. He eats like a hog, not because he really believes he’s a hog, but because he knows it will rattle Grant; he mocks Grant with his eyes, knowing that in him, Grant sees his own failures.

But as the novel continues, as Grant starts to understand what Tante Lou and Miss Emma  really want him to do to help Jefferson, the object of Grant’s rebellion begins to shift. Grant is frustrated because “making Jefferson into a man” will not accomplish anything concrete: Jefferson will still die, convicted and executed by an unjust legal system for a crime he didn’t commit. But Grant begins to understand why even accomplishments that seem useless have a great impact. He contemplates the great baseball player Jackie Robinson, and the wrestler Joe Louis, two iconic sports heroes. They both accomplished great feats, but their significance to the people in the quarter wasn’t really the concrete fact that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball; in all likelihood no one in that quarter was going to grow up and become a major league baseball player to benefit from that. The significance, instead, was symbolic. Jackie Robinson stoically absorbing insults all around him and gaining the moral high ground; Joe Louis coming back from a defeat to win against a Nazi. In terms of how much it will directly influence the life of people in the quarter, Jackie Robinson’s accomplishments and Jefferson’s behavior on the walk to the electric chair will be very similar: they’ll change almost nothing. But the people will be able “hold [their] heads higher than any people on earth had ever done for any reason.”

Grant says that when he was younger, he “began to listen, to listen closely to how they talked about their heroes, how they talked about their dead and how great the dead had once been.” As the novel continues, Grant begins to see that changing the image the white power structure wants to project into one that gives Tante Lou, Miss Emma, and the rest of the community a hero is its own form of subverting the regime, even if there is no tangible change in the actual system.

It is Jefferson himself who solidifies Grant’s new understanding of the value in being a hero. When Grant meets with Jefferson in the dayroom to give him the pencil and paper, Grant tries to explain to Jefferson why he should eat the food and make an effort to be strong for his godmother, but ends up explaining to himself why he must succeed in what Tante Lou and Miss Emma want him to do. He says to Jefferson, “The last thing they ever want is to see a black man stand, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all. It would destroy their myth. [...] You have the chance of being bigger than anyone who has ever lived on that plantation or come from this little town.” As Grant understands the impact Jefferson has on the community, Grant is no longer as consumed by his self-imposed isolation and rebellion from his aunt and everyone else. Instead, the focus of his rebellion becomes the white power structure, and helping Jefferson defy it.

Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is an unconventional and on some level disturbing novel. For me, at least, every time I finished a reading I found myself in a really strange mood, and although I’m glad I did read it (eventually. RIP my quiz grades), I’m not so sure I’ll be reaching for this book as casual reading in the future. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this general sense of weirdness (beyond the fact that the plot centers on a dysfunctional family carting around their mother’s decomposing corpse) but I think one of the most disorienting parts of this book is the way it approaches heroism.

Anse, as himself, doesn’t seem like a hero: his defining trait is indecisiveness and the inability to do literally anything. His philosophy is that, because humans were built upright, God “aimed for them to stay put like a tree or a stand of corn.” Although he claims to always provide for his family, his survival is mostly thanks to everyone around him constantly bailing him out. Even his physical appearance is dreary and hopeless, always hunched and unsure of himself, and with a face sunken by his missing set of teeth. The setting, too, is mundane: they ride a rickety cart through the dusty, sparsely populated Yoknapatawpha County. The trip is a fiasco, and by the end, every Bundren but Anse has lost some defining element of their character: Cash can no longer be a good carpenter, Darl is in an asylum, Jewel lost his horse, Dewey Dell is trapped by an unwanted pregnancy and Vardaman is probably traumatized.

From a purely structural point of view, though, many of the elements of a hero’s journey fit into place. The way the novel begins is very similar to Campbell’s paradigm of a hero’s journey. The family is motivated to go to Jefferson by Addie’s dying wish to be buried with her family, which could be Campbell’s “Call to Adventure.” They have the choice to refuse the quest -- burying Addie at home would be much easier and safer than going to Jefferson -- but don’t, and when they eventually start off towards Jefferson, Anse’s narration makes it clear that what might be a simple road trip for someone else is for him “Entering the Unknown.” The “Supernatural Aid” is a little less obvious, but every Bundren seems to have their own talisman they carry with them to Jefferson, and also some quality that seems to be just slightly beyond the domain of an ordinary person. Cash, for instance, has his toolbox and unbreakable stoicism; Jewel has the horse that only he can ride. The “Supreme Ordeal” would of course be burying Addie, and for Anse, his reward is a new wife and the long-awaited set of teeth.

And the more you think about it, the more it seems like if we were given this novel in another light, the same traits that initially seemed fundamentally un-heroic could fit into this paradigm as well. If the hero is someone who doesn’t fit into the ordinary world, someone with a quality that sets them apart from everyone else, Anse could definitely fit the mold: perhaps his mysterious sweat allergy is actually a supernatural asset, and maybe his aversion to travel is what makes this long journey so heroic for him in the first place. Maybe the people who always had to help him out were no different than the helpers and gods Odysseus encountered; maybe the traumatized Bundren family doesn’t deserve our sympathy any more than Odysseus’s doomed crew did. And good old Yoknapatawpha county, too, needs only a little embellishment to paint it as a great land as mysterious as Ithaca, ruled by uncontrollable floods, capital-G God, and noble, unbreakable family vows.

This ambiguity is compounded by how the novel’s multiple narrators and their varying degrees of reliability force the reader to be constantly aware of how subjective any view of the situation really is. Some of the chapters are so abstract that it’s genuinely difficult to be sure of fairly concrete plot elements, and the one person who does seem to be a reliable narrator, Darl, is recounting events that he couldn’t logically have seen, and ends the novel laughing uncontrollably on the way to a mental institution. It makes the question of heroism much more complicated because the elements that make a hero do seem to be in the novel, but it’s hard to interpret what they all mean when you can’t tell if an idea is the truth or a narrator's opinion.

relatable

Judging by the amount of ambivalent feelings toward Odysseus in all the blog posts about the slaughter (mine included), it’s pretty clear that in the 2000 years that have elapsed since it was first published, we are all hopeful our moral ideals have advanced somewhat. And it’s true, they have: like Telemachus, we've all experienced the soul-crushing despair of someone stealing all of your food, but it is no longer a societally acceptable response to murder them in retaliation. And yet there are still parts of the Odyssey that are strangely familiar to all of us, even in a world so alien to what Homer experienced. One obvious example of this is the heartwarming reunion of Homer with his beloved Argos, who still recognizes his master after 20 years of his absence: Odysseus sheds a single tear, and the faithful dog can finally die in peace at last. There’s other elements, too, that make it a satisfying and familiar read for our modern times: the theme of homecoming and reuniting as a family, and Telemachus’s abbreviated coming-of-age story as he tries to measure up to his father’s example.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou as an adaptation of The Odyssey, these same ideas come into play as Ulysses tries to get back to his family and Tommy (even though he’s not really a Telemachus parallel as I’m implying) tries to make it for himself in the world. But one of the most striking things about O Brother is how it goes beyond these broad themes to still mean something to us today. Just like The Odyssey is a representation of Ancient Greek heroic mythology and a cultural cross-section of the times, O Brother does the same thing, albeit humorously, for the American viewer.

The world of The Odyssey didn’t spring from Homer’s imagination fully formed (get it?) just for the purpose of this one epic poem; Odysseus instead finds himself in the same Greek mythological universe we’re all familiar with, facing the same belligerent gods and deadly monsters as every other classic Greek hero. At first glance, it might seem like this elaborate, complex universe is the antithesis of American entertainment: this country has only been around for a fraction of the time of the Greeks and an uncomfortably large amount of that time was spent squashing other people’s cultural traditions instead of creating our own. But in O Brother, we do see many examples of American semi-mythological motifs that, although we don’t realize it, might play a similar role in the American collective unconscious as Scylla and Charybdis did for the Greeks.

One of the most obvious examples of this is George “Babyface” Nelson, who was actually based on a real figure, but whose character in O Brother goes beyond that. It’s kind of a weird dynamic, but it come up in a lot of other movies and books: the bank robber who is simultaneously the unambiguous default criminal, and inflated into a larger-than-life semi-hero. Every wild west movie and a lot of current hero movies as well feature one of these figures, and although the hero is usually the one defeating them, there’s also an enviable air of mystery and power around this villain themselves too. Think of The Dark Knight. It obviously features Batman as the classic hero, but the Joker’s ingenious plan to rob a high-security bank is also set up as an impressive and admirable feat. In less recent movie examples, there’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), with two outlaws as the actual main characters, and Jesse James (1939) about another bandit. In both films, the outlaws are dangerous criminals, based on real people but inflated to heroic proportions.

There’s also the music in O Brother, much of which comes from adaptations of real american folk songs passed down for generations. Traditional American folk music serves many of the same functions as bards in The Odyssey and ancient Greece: entertainment, bonding, and passing traditional stories -- and, by extension, traditional ideals -- down to the next generation. Like The Odyssey and other Greek myths reinforce the value of hospitality and following the gods, the folk songs in O Brother refer back to American traditional ideals, whether that’s being a hardworking “Man of sorrow” who longs to return to his homeland, or a respectable (respectability dynamic!!), pious person “going down to the river to pray, studying about that good old way.”

O Brother is, at times, a clear adaptation of The Odyssey to fit into the world of the depression-era American South. But it's also an adaptation of the hero's journey itself for an American audience, and it's interesting because it brings out some of the ways that even now, 2000 years later, we’re not so different from Homer and the ancient Greeks. We have our own mythology with figures that we inflate, idolize, and let shape our ideals and visions of the world. Like the Greeks had their Achilles and Odysseus, we have heroic bank robbers, downtrodden convicts who overcome all the odds, and musicians who sell their soul to the devil. And as the Greeks’ ideas of justice were steeped in bard’s tales of hospitality and obedience to the gods’ will, so are ours shaped, maybe, by the echoes of American traditional culture that, even if we don't realize it, still mold our visions of heroes and morality today.

fate and free will

One of the most prominent motifs in the scenes of Odysseus’s homecoming is the idea of testing people to prove their loyalty. When he arrives back to Ithaca, Odysseus doesn’t tell anyone who he really is until he tells a long, elaborate lie about his identity and tries to suss out their allegiance to him first. He and Athena collaborate in testing the suitors, and Odysseus goes to meet them, disguised as a beggar, to see who will offer him some of their food. But passing the test doesn’t promise safety: Athena makes it clear that even the suitors who give Odysseus food will still be slaughtered in the end. The scene is confusing, but it brings out one of the most interesting aspects of The Odyssey: the complex relationship between individual free will, fate, and the gods’ influence.

Personal morality clearly plays an important role in the Odyssey. The importance of being kind to strangers, for example, is a driving force in the main plot: the suitors are the bad guys because they are abusing Telemachus’s hospitality, and in Odysseus’s travels, we hear the saying “every stranger comes from Zeus” more than once. Individual choices are also significant: the sailors met their fate because “the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all.” It’s clear throughout the epic that Homer doesn’t feel any sympathy toward them, and the reader shouldn’t either: not only did they deserve what they got, they did it to themselves, too. Odysseus’ identity as a hero stems not just from his exploits in the Trojan war but also from his bright ideas, determination, and loyalty to his beloved wife Penelope: heroic traits because they are moral, and require great personal willpower to achieve.

But the impact of free will is complicated because “doing the right thing” doesn’t always depend on doing what’s compassionate or logical, but instead on following the will of the gods. And the will of the gods is often fickle. While marooned on the island of Helios, Odysseus’ men are starving, and only eat one of the sacred cattle as a last resort. They promise Helios a great temple with heaps of sacrifices once they return home: but he kills them all at sea anyway. When Poseidon returns from Ethiopia to see Odysseus safely returned home, he has no qualms about transferring his wrath to the innocent Phaeacians instead, and after a quick and lighthearted brainstorming session with Zeus, he not only turns their best sailors to stone but surrounds each port with mountains that will destroy the Phaeacians’ entire livelihood as well.

There’s also the question of fate, which at times seems to be driven by the gods and at times beyond even them. From the beginning of the Telemachiad we see Athena carefully molding Telemachus into the hero that best completes her story, and she does the same thing to Odysseus, helping him to succeed outright and twisting events to make the story more exciting behind the scenes. The reader might wonder how much of either person’s heroism is their own and how much is Athena’s creation. But then there’s also the numerous prophecies that come true regardless of how much people try to thwart them, and that not even the gods can change. In the case of the unfortunate Phaeacians, Zeus and Poseidon smiting them fulfilled a prophecy they had known for years, and the gods weren’t even aware of it.

All of these elements make Odysseus’s hero’s journey more complex: It’s hard to tell how much of his success is due to his own actions, and how much is Athena, or fate, or those same influences acting on his unfortunate adversaries. It all lines up to make Odysseus the hero, but at the same time, it’s a little harder to root for him when it seems like so much of his success isn't really his own doing.

Ender's Game and the Hero's Journey

I never really liked hero stories. For me, every story was the same: the hero always did the right thing, the hero was brave enough to save the day, the hero had a happy ending. He (or, occasionally, she) ignored rules and laws, but it didn’t matter because their morals were never in question, and they saved the day anyway. It was the good guys vs. the bad guys and the good guys always won. Maybe if I had looked at it differently, I could have seen inspiration or at least reassurance in that, but I didn't. Instead, it always seemed fake. I felt like I was being lied to.

The problem with hero stories is that it all works out on paper, the good defeats the evil, but in real life it's never that simple. In real life, everyone thinks they’re the hero, and someone is inevitably going to be wrong. As a kid I was always worried that person would be me --- that I would grow up and think I was the hero, give my life to a cause or an idea but eventually, far too late, realize it was the wrong one. Or worse, never realize at all, and be laughed at in a future classroom as another poor sucker on the wrong side of history. I would read historical fiction, or stories about a dystopian future world, and every time, I wanted to see myself in the war hero, the revolutionary, the underground spy. But I couldn’t help worrying that instead, I would find myself in the blind crowds following the corrupt dictator. Because just like any hero, they too must have thought they were doing the right thing.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t read hero stories: I sped through Harry Potter and Percy Jackson just as quickly as everyone else. But I didn't like the heroes themselves. People like characters they can see themselves in, and I, the awkward middle school nerd who questioned everything I did, could never see myself in a hero that always had the right choice laid out so neatly in front of them. So when I read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, I approached it with exactly the same skeptical worldview that I threw at every other hero story I encountered. But as I soon realized, Ender was a very different hero than the others I had encountered.

The story is set in the distant future, after Earth had already once defended itself from a murderous alien race but was deep in desperate preparations for another war. In the beginning, Ender is the classic “chosen one,” born at the request of the International Military Federation (IMF) to be the military commander that would save the human race. His early life is shaped by his loving sister Valentine and his brother Peter who is cruelly manipulative and explicitly capable of killing his siblings. All three siblings are geniuses, and all three were born for the purpose of saving the human race but only Ender was accepted: the idea was that he needed to be part Valentine, part Peter to succeed. Ender’s story fits the arc of the hero’s journey well: at the request of a senior IMF officer, Ender must leave his family to train on a space station to be a military officer for IMF, and after much personal effort and transformation he eventually succeeds in killing the aliens and returns home victorious. But the character of Ender is much more complex than it might seem.

Ender is the hero, and at heart he is a very moral person, but he is forced to become like his brother Peter in order to succeed. As the story goes on, Ender is torn apart and always unsure of whether what he is doing is justified. Everything he does is supposed to be for the greater good, but as he is manipulated into getting increasingly ruthless he, and the reader, are left unsure of whether it was worth it. And in the end, (spoiler alert, even though it was published in 1985 and you’ve all had 32 years to read it) he does launch a bomb into the home planet and kill the alien race but in exchange for succeeding in his hero’s journey he is rewarded with the knowledge that he extinguished an entire species that wasn’t even intending to attack Earth in the first place. As a spoil of war, he receives the last remaining offspring of the species, and a responsibility to find a place they can live in peace.
I was really captivated by the book for a while, and looking back, I think it was because Ender was the kind of person I was afraid of becoming, the hero who succeeds only to find they were on the wrong side. I revisited the novel again and again because the moral dilemmas Ender faced, and the constant internal struggle of whether he was doing the right thing, fascinated me. Ender was manipulated into doing something horrible, but in the end he found the truth and the novel ends with him going on another journey, for the right reason this time, and making amends. I didn't like hero stories because they were too fake and straightforward. Ender was the opposite, and in a weird way it was reassuring to twelve-year-old Elizabeth when I read it because it meant that someone who did, in the end, do the right thing didn't have to come to it by some unshakable moral compass that let them paint the world black and white and always choose the right side: instead, the hero could face the same doubts and ambiguity that everyone has to face and yet still complete the journey and still, somehow, save the day.