Heroes in Literature

Paper Summary:

This paper considers the nature of heroes in literature, seeing heroes as those who overcome great odds to achieve their ends. It explains that the heroes of both "The Odyssey" of Homer and "Tristan and Iseult" by Joseph Bedier have goals that determine their actions. The paper notes that Odysseus wants to get home after the Trojan War, and Tristan, one of the knights in Arthurian romances, wants to be united with his love, Iseult, though ultimately is only able to do this in death.

From the Paper:

"Heroes are those who overcome great odds to achieve their ends. The heroes of both The Odyssey of Homer and Tristan and Iseult by Joseph Bedier have goals that determine their actions. Odysseus wants to get home after the Trojan War, and Tristan, one of the knights in Arthurian romances, wants to be united with his love, Iseult, though ultimately is only able to do this in death. Odysseus in The Iliad is presented as the shrewdest of the Greeks as well as a great warrior. It is Odysseus who devises the gift of the Trojan Horse, the action which leads to the fall of Troy. At the beginning of The Odyssey, he is found imprisoned on Calypso's island ten years after the end of that war. When we meet him in this epic poem, he is a man in such despair at his fate that he has given up even trying to get home."

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