Should Heroes Save the World or Find Themselves?

In 1879, Henrik Ibsen published a play that sent shockwaves through Norway and then later the world. In A Doll’s House, the main protagonist is Nora Helmer, a henpecked wife and mother of three children. In the play, Nora makes a mistake that invites the rage of her selfish, obnoxious husband. His cruelty and selfishness are put on full display, but above all he is seen as patronizing. Throughout the play, but especially in the ending, he treats her like she is his little doll, rather than treating her like a friend and an equal.

Now, good literature involves subverting expectations, or, as it is more popularly called, surprising twists. How will the henpecked wife respond? When her husband berates her and his true colors are revealed, what will she do? How will she face this challenge? The ending of A Doll’s House was truly a surprise ending for the time: she left. She left her family. She left her children. She couldn’t take it anymore, so she just walked away.

For that time, what she did was unthinkable and scandalous. How could a woman just up and leave her family? But today that ending wouldn’t be surprising. Today, that would be the ending people expect. Today, Nora would be a hero. People would cheer her leaving her jerk husband because we live in a culture where the classic hero story is being completely reconfigured.¹ A hero is no longer someone who sacrifices himself or herself for the good of others. Rather, a hero is someone who puts himself first. The hero’s quest is no longer slaying the dragon or saving the princess or ending the war. The hero’s quest is now to go on an important journey of self-discovery.

This has not always been the case. The classic hero story began with a problem that a hero needed to solve. Normally, other people were counting on our hero, and if the hero failed there would be consequences for everyone. The hero went on a journey that required sacrifice, hard work, and often personal moral growth. In the end the hero overcomes the obstacles, wins the prize, and is rewarded.

But there is a new hero story. This hero also faces a problem, but this problem is not primarily one on the outside; it’s on the inside. This hero has a crisis of identity. “Who am I?” the hero wants to know. And so the hero goes on a journey, not to fix a problem, not to face evil, not to take down a villain or find bread for hungry children or defend someone who is being unjustly attacked. No, the hero goes on a journey to discover himself.

In this telling of the story, other people are actually part of the problem! It’s the crushing expectations of everyone around them that is the real problem. They just need to be free from all those expectations, so they leave their responsibilities so that they can find themselves. To be fair, many hero stories have both elements – a hero must solve the problem, and in the process finds out who he is. But the emphasis matters, and there has been a noticeable shift from wanting heroes who become what they need to be for others and wanting heroes who are striving to seek and live out who they really are.

Behind much of this is a cultural shift that has deep roots in some really bad ideas that have been around since at least the 1800s, if not earlier. One of the best explanations of this shift is Carl Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. In this work, he shows how really bad ideas from thinkers like Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and others have rewired the way people see the world. Problems in my life are no longer something I must overcome; they are the result of society (and in particular those obnoxious Christians) who are suppressing who I really am. The term for this is “expressive individualism,” the belief that in order to be truly happy I must express who I am on the inside.

Once you notice this theme you start to see it everywhere. Disney’s story of Hercules is the tale of a Greek hero, but the lyrics of one of the main songs include “I would go most anywhere to find where I belong.” Moana sings how she can’t be the girl her father wants to be because she longs to sail the ocean. Rapunzel must realize that she is actually the princess. Elsa must figure out who she really is so that she can control her powers. I could go on.

But it’s not just Disney. Perhaps one of the most ridiculous examples of this was the widely mocked Stranger Things finale. Apparently, one of the main characters couldn’t truly tap into his psychic powers and win the day until he admitted to everyone that he was secretly homosexual. About a year ago I was explaining this dynamic to my junior and senior high school Apologetics class. I had a student raise their hand immediately and ask, “Like in the Barbie movie?” Now, I have not seen the Barbie movie, as shocking as that might be. But I thought it was interesting that when I explained this to a group of high schoolers, one of them immediately made a connection with the real world. This is the soup we live in,² and once you see it you can’t unsee it.

What does Scripture have to say to all of this? First, Scripture anchors our identity in the fact that we are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-28) and for believers that we are now in union with Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17; Ephesians 1:3-14). We don’t need to go on some long journey of self-discovery. I don’t look within to figure out who I really am. I look to God and His Word. God defines my identity, it is not self-discovered or self-created.

But beyond that, Scripture gives us duties and responsibilities to fulfill. Rather than navel-gazing and trying to decide “who I really am,” I have been called to be a husband, father, and pastor, and there are Scriptural passages that give duties and obligations for each of these roles. All of us have God-given responsibilities, and we should put our time and energy into doing what God has called us to do. If not, we end up with a world full of selfish adults looking out for number one and patting each other on the back the whole time assuring one another that “they are doing the right thing.” Families collapse, children are harmed, and civilizations decay as everyone does that which is right in their own eyes.

The stories we tell matter. From our earliest years, they teach us what the world looks like and what successful living in that world looks like. For that reason, the shift from the hero’s journey to the hero’s self-discovery is an important and disastrous change. It has trained an entire generation to think that figuring out who they are is the key to success. That’s not true, and right now we are reaping the whirlwind.

So we need some old-fashioned-stories. Stories of heroes fighting dragons and saving princesses. Stories of people growing to take on responsibilities they weren’t originally prepared for. Stories of growth, sacrifice, discipline, duty, and honor. We need stories that focus less on finding oneself and more on saving the world. Or, better yet, doing what God has called us to do.

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1. None of this to excuse jerk husbands, or say that staying behind to raise the children would have been easy. Of course, when dealing with instances of physical abuse, the safety of the wife and children must be considered and proper authorities should be informed. [↩]
2. The term that Trueman uses is “social imaginary,” a phrase coined by Charles Taylor. This refers to the shared beliefs, customs, values, and ideas that a culture takes for granted. It is the intellectual version of a fish not realizing it is swimming in water. [↩]