You know what strikes me the most about Lord of the Rings? The protagonist is weaker than most of the characters in the book and his journey teaches him to overcome his weaknesses and gain new strengths. We see the building of a hero and we see him rise above to a cause even in moments of self-doubt.
When I was growing up I shunned Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and most other adolescent books. The protagonists knew french, ski-diving, could repair a car, had fancy gadgets and always were best friends with an expert in some facet of technology. Arrghh! I tried to search for a hero who didnt come form outer space, or who had a luxurious inheritance. I moved quickly to more complex stories, Grisham, Steele, Chrichton, Maclean and still found myself in a world where action, adventure and thrilling stories happened only to the initiated ones.
I had issues with mythological gods as well because they always seem unerring. And even if they would commit some promiscuity, one could quickly find literary texts supporting their actions, attempting to deify the erroneous even more. At an age when ‘Who is your role model’ received a sure shot answer from my friends, I stumbled. Why should we have a role model? Why is any protagonist so great that one needs to model oneself after them? Im not a skeptic. I do appreciate each person for their characteristics. But it is the eccentricities and flaws that paint a person in richer hues. So it wasnt very long before I entered the seemingly boring world of non-fiction, profanely terming and entire world of fiction writing as a simple ‘page-popper’.
Smugly sitting on an intellectual bench with a hardbound philosophy book, I notice now that our heroes are changing. It really is the influence of the internet. Becoming a hero is as merely as laborious as uploading a video on youtube or writing a blog. Your classroom project could feature you in a movie, turn you into a millionaire and pop your photo on teenage tshirts. The omnipresent, omniscient protagonist is leaving our pages. And we are going to see more of this. Kickass, Zuckerberg, Jobs, Swan, Salander and many more are walking down the aisle with a new generation of writers. The new protagonists create rave waves of reviews, fan following and less cereal boxes and stuffed toys. Its the pages when they fail and reciprocate their angst and their obsession that imprint in our minds when the book has long turned to its back.
Hello friends of Frodo! There is alot of room on my shelf for you.
