I realize it's pretty late to be posting on this topic, but bear with me-
A couple of weeks ago we read the short story "Victory Lap." I really enjoyed this narrative and was actually really moved by it. When reading it with the context of this class in mind (aka trying to focus on the hero), I found components of a hero in both Allison and Kyle. It actually seemed as these two characters sort of fill in for the heroic qualities that the other lack.
To be a hero, you need some sort of cause, something you accomplish. A lot of times when we think of a hero, we think of an individual who saves someone or something from a terrible fate. Using this as part of our criteria Kyle is definitely a hero. He saves Allison from being abducted and raped. But, Kyle isn't the only one doing the saving. As Kyle saves Allison, Allison saves Kyle as well. She saves him from becoming a murderer.
Not only do Allison and Kyle's actions combine heroically but their actual characteristics do as well. They each provide different qualities of archetypal heroes. Kyle has somewhat meager origins, or at least comparatively. He's the underdog. He's unpopular, awkward and skinny, has controlling parents who raised him not to stand up for anything, He's also very modest and doesn't believe in his own bravery until he actually proves it.
Allison, we can infer, is fairly popular and has normal parents, and she also fantasizes that she's some great good deed-doer in contrast to Kyle. But she too possesses heroic qualities, albeit different from Kyle's. She is very compassionate; she tries to see the good in everyone and in life and seems to think everyone deserves happiness. She appreciates peoples' circumstances, like when she was thinking about her teacher getting a divorce and still coming to school and caring about her students. Allison believes that life is generally good, but you have to be brave and step up to the plate when it counts.
I found it interesting to think about how maybe Allison and Kyle aren't just heroes on their own, but come together to form the overall hero of the narrative. The story could be read in such a way where Kyle is the only main hero, but I prefer to look at it from different angles.
This "reciprocal" hero arrangement is one of my favorite aspects of this story--the mirror images of Kyle on his porch, trying to figure out whether or not to get involved, and Alison looking out her window, trying to figure out whether to call out to Kyle and bring him back to his senses. Their social worlds keep them apart at school, in a dynamic we all recognize (girls like Alison generally don't hang out with guys like Kyle, even if they were pals as little kids), but this story orchestrates a beautiful situation where they get to save each other. We might smile at some of Alison's daydreaming (she's not Mother Theresa, at least *not yet*), but in the end I think the story does offer a pretty positive picture of the world. There are bad guys in vans (who, let it be said, are dealing with their own baggage), but these good kids are looking out for each other, and surprising themselves with their own acts of heroism.
ReplyDeleteI would definitely agree that Alison and Kyle together share the heroism of the narrative. To me Alison and Kyle were very contrasting characters and I think that their personalities complemented each other.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea that Kyle and Alison fill the voids in each other's characteristics, but I definitely think of it in a different way. I find that Alison is more of a catalyst for Kyle's unknown heroic traits that he has had all along. Without Alison getting into that situation, Kyle may have never known that he is capable of making split-second decisions that can change lives.
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