064: Everyman Heroes: They're Doing Their Best™, Okay?

Hi friends,

It’s time for part two of the mini-series on heroes! Last time, I covered classic heroes. Today I’m covering Everyman Heroes, which are personally my favorite kind of hero. They’ve always existed, but I would bet that if we could crunch the numbers on it, we would see that number of everyman heroes who serve as the main protagonist has probably skyrocketed in the last seventy-five years.

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All right, here we go.

You’ve probably come across the term “the everyman.” It’s a way of talking about qualities that are pretty much universal across a culture, if not all of humanity. An everyman type is not specific or special, they’re anybody. The everyman is every man; it’s well-named. And that’s the foundation of this character archetype.

Some well-known everyman heroes include Neville Longbottom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Edna Pontellier, Bilbo Baggins, Anna, and almost every character Paul Rudd has ever played. You know these characters—even if you don’t recognize their names right away. That’s okay! That’s kind of the point, in fact.

Every one of these characters is just a person. They’re usually nice enough. They have average abilities, average intelligence, average charm, average looks. There’s nothing wrong with them, so it’s rare to hate them, but they’re also not really an archetype that people aspire to. Which sounds mean, I know! I don’t mean it in a bad way; if you’re not on a pedestal you can’t be dragged off of it. Sometimes we love these characters; Anna has a big following among young girls who can’t relate to Elsa’s morose darker side. (“Oh, right, Anna from Frozen,” I hear you saying.) And the older I get, the more I understand Bilbo dragging his feet before setting off on an adventure.

Is Bilbo the grumpiest hero in fiction? Discuss. Source.

Everyman heroes are almost always normal people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time but decide to rise to the occasion. Neville Longbottom (from Harry Potter), seizing the Sword of Gryffindor to kill Nagini is a perfect example; no one expected it of him, and that’s what makes the moment so satisfying. The reader watched Neville try his hardest but rarely rise above mediocrity for six straight books; in book seven Neville finally comes into his own and it culminates in this feat of bravery and athleticism that no one else was capable of.

Edna Pontellier, the main character of The Awakening by Kate Chopin, is also a great example from literary fiction. She’s just a woman living in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. She has artistic aspirations and she proves to be brave enough to leave a loveless marriage (very daring in the 19th century), but she’s not “special” the way that classic heroes are. This was Chopin’s point—this was a work of feminism, showing what life was like for normal women, so Edna had to be as normal as possible.

Even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are arguably villains in Hamlet, are recast as hapless everyman heroes in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. They stumble through their lives, Hamlet’s tragedy happening in the background, trying to do the right thing but not really sure what the right thing is. They make attempts to rise to the occasion but they’re usually too late or are outsmarted. They’re the least heroic characters who make my list, but I think they count because they are doing their best. Their best just isn’t great.

Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), directed by Tom Stoppard.

The decision to try to rise to the occasion is key for the everyman hero archetype. If they don’t try to slay the snake or go on the adventure, then they’re just side characters. Sometimes they can accidentally do stuff; maybe they stumble into the bookcase because they lost their balance tying their shoe, and the bookcase falls and kills the bad guy. You could argue that that’s an everyman hero, but it’s really more of just like… a lucky character. Comedic relief.

The decision to try is what sets everyman heroes apart from their affable friends. They might fail, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did. They might whine the whole time, like Bilbo. But they make the decision to try and that’s what makes them heroic. If classic heroes are the cream of the crop of humanity, then the everyman hero is the closest most of us will ever get. Most of us have taxes and groceries and jobs—classic heroes don’t deal with any of that. But everyman heroes do! They have overbearing grandmothers and date the wrong guy. They make mistakes. And that’s what makes them relatable. We may all aspire to the pure goodness of a classic hero, but we can all relate to an everyman hero.

I hope you liked this installment! We have two more essays for our hero series. What do y’all want to hear about next?

Thanks for reading! Come join us for one of our May virtual writing sessions!

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