“A Little Hero” (1857)

“A Little Hero” has a marvelous ability to render a breadth of situations and characters that give the story a lifelike quality, all the while unifying it all through a central theme, much like Netochka Nezvanova.  This theme of the dangers of the attention we can pay each other is well explored, yet “A Little Hero” isn’t as compelling as it could be because of its authorial dishonesty.

Fiction is a strange task.  In it, we are fabricating a reality, but not willy-nilly.  The best fiction invents in such a way that sheds light on The Great Reality.  My mind is full of stories, many of them toxically false.  The art of fiction writing has to do with uncovering the stories that ring true—stories that shed common delusions so that we can have a fresh experience of the real.  This kind of writing requires an abhorrence for delusion and a commitment to inner honesty as one enters the dark forest of the imagination.

“A Little Hero” sinks into authorial dishonesty when it fails to maintain the tension between the self and the other.  Ironically, the story describes its own pitfall well when describing Monsieur M.’s type: “All nature, the whole world for them is no more than a splendid mirror created for the little god to admire himself continually in it, and to see no one and nothing behind himself.”

When I become self-obsessed, I lose all sense of otherness.  All others become reduced to what they think about me.  A tell-tale attitude of this sort of delusional imagining is: “There’s the world and everyone in it.  And then there’s me.”  I view myself as separate from the human family, either seeing myself as superior to them all or else more pitiable.  In several places, “A Little Hero” falls into the latter.  The narrator regularly describes himself as an excluded outsider who is only met with ridicule from society, which he characterizes as a mocking crowd where only egoists can flourish.  

This problem often happens when I over-identify with one of my characters.  In other words, when I can’t distinguish the character from a fantasy I have about myself.  If I have a character in my story whose consciousness is more dominant than the others, I must cultivate some sense of seeing this character from the outside, otherwise that character’s consciousness will swamp the whole story, and the narrative will have no sense of reality but will be a slave to the delusions of the character (the most powerful of which is perhaps that sense of being flawlessly correct).  I will “see no one and nothing behind” myself.  A sense of reality requires at least two points of perspective.

The I’m-an-outsider-in-a-hostile-world attitude is textbook delusional thinking.  If a character is constantly giving off I’m-so-great-but-they-won’t-let-me-succeed vibes, that character will often fall into the author’s vicarious self-pity unless the author is able to establish some sort of distance from the character.  That isn’t to say that real groups never actually exclude people, or that I can’t write about this experience.  What I mean is that me-versus-the-world stories normally veer toward narcissist delusions unless the author can keep in mind that humanity doesn’t exist solely for the sake of either praising or excluding some special, central person.  If the author fails to do this, the other flattens into a mirror.

My mind is so keen to believe that I am an under-appreciated star that I must approach relatable outsider characters with an effort at objectivity.  Dostoevsky does this masterfully in Notes from Underground.  The Underground Man says, “I am one, and they are all,” but Dostoevsky, through use of irony, maintains enough distance from his creation to allow the reader to see the Underground Man as he really is—one of the other human beings.  And perhaps even more profoundly, the Underground Man allows me to see my own delusion.

The self-obsessed imagination not only over-identifies with protagonists, it also under-identifies with antagonists.  They, too, can’t be viewed as one of the other human beings but are reduced to their negative impact on the protagonist.  As an author, I have first-hand access to only one human experience: my own.  Thus the only way I have to bring life to characters is to find some aspect of myself within them.  When I refuse to find myself in a character, I suck the life out of them.  That doesn’t mean that I can’t write villains—it only means that if I am to write a villain well, I must find the villain in myself.  Ironically, if I can’t find myself in my darker characters, they end up like me anyway, only in less compelling forms—projections of my pet peeves, or even sloppy renderings of my problems that I’m unable to face.  

In a self-centered mindset, I must be constantly and universally adored, and when (inevitably) I’m not, the reason must be personal, and so I assume the world is hostile.  Thus hostility is characteristic of the narcissist’s world.  

Since the setting of “A Little Hero” is one of these hostile worlds, it’s not surprising that the Hero starts to romanticize deceit.  When Madame M. lies with such charming innocence to her husband about meeting another man in secret, the Hero suggests that innocence can’t do otherwise than lie when husbands are so pompous and society is so eager to condemn.  Thus the vicious world of “A Little Hero” naturally lends itself to valorizing deception, which is what riddles the action with nonsense.  A story that champions deceit cannot be honest.

I enjoy fiction that makes me feel like I’m getting somewhere, like I’m moving toward truth and not away from it.  This is a tall order, and to throw away honesty—the only compass I have—bodes poorly.  If I, as an author, can’t commit to being honest with myself, I can’t expect my stories to land anywhere other than in a tedious, distorted house of mirrored self-delusions.