Ok y'all, I need your opinions for my first writing assignment. As I mentioned in class and previously on the blog, I plan on studying the heroism of multiple characters in Chiang's short stories. Just going through "Stories of your Life and Others" I can see the heroism of main characters in "Tower of Babylon", "Understand", "Seventy-Two Letters", and "Hell is The Absence of God". I feel that the main character in "Story of Your Life" deserves an honorable mention, but I am having trouble calling her a definitive hero. Do any of you see her acts as heroic? I see her as preserving her legacy, bot necessarily going out of her way to make sacrifices that directly benefit another. In addition to that story, I couldn't find in heroes worthy of discussion in "Liking What you See". Since is was documentary style, it covered multiple aspects of calli and I didn't feel that one character took a strong enough position on the issue to be considered heroic.
I would appreciate any thoughts!
I think it's a good topic, and can generate a good discussion of what it means to be "heroic." I didn't particularly see the narrator of "Story of Your Life" as heroic. She mostly seems to be living out the life she sees in her strange perception of time. Perhaps her efforts in translating the heptapod language could be seen as heroic.
ReplyDeleteI almost feel that she had accepted the fact that she would live her life exactly as she had seen it. It didn't really matter if she wanted to be heroic or if she actually was or wasn't heroic. In the end everything that happened was predestined and there really wasn't anything she could do to change things. Don't know if that's what you were looking for but it's all I could think of her situation.
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