Heroes and Mock-Heroes Trivia Quiz

Answer: King Lear

Odysseus is the classic epic hero from the Greek period, Aeneas from the Roman period, and Beowulf from the Anglo-Saxon period. Shakespeare's King Lear is a tragic, not an epic, hero. The epic is panoramic in scope, usually covering lots of geography and many years, and its hero is the virtually flawless exemplar of the ideals of his culture. Tragedy is narrower in scope and its hero, though great in stature like the epic hero, has some flaw that causes him to fall from the highest heights to the lowest depths.

Answer: Forgiveness of those who offend

Forgiveness may be a great virtue in the Christian era, but in the likes of Homer's "The Odyssey," the ability to exact revenge against offenders is the more celebrated trait. The other three virtues form part of the "paste" that holds the heroic order together.

Answer: Odysseus (1), Oedipus (2), Plato's Socrates (3), Sterne's Yorick (4)

Homer's Odysseus, Sophocles's Oedipus, Plato's Socrates, and Laurence Sterne's Yorick (who appears in both "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey") are pat representatives of the respective categories. The other answers all have one or more assignments that are unambiguously false; e.g., neither Tom Jones nor Gulliver can ever fit the "tragic hero" mold, nor can Hamlet be considered by any stretch an epic hero.

Answer: Folk hero

Nicholas is the quintessential folk hero. He hails from the lower classes (unlike the standard tragic or epic heroes), wins not by prowess or chivalric virtues but by cleverness, and generally brings things to a comic conclusion. The absurd hero, keyed to an existentialist world view, is one who chooses to act morally with the full knowledge that it is meaningless to do so.

The tragic hero would require an aristocratic pedigree, a crucial flaw or misunderstanding, and a tragic ending, none of which apply to Nicholas. Nicholas also lacks the sublime passion and high seriousness of the Byronic hero.

Answer: John Milton's "Paradise Lost"

Dante's "Divine Comedy" is considered the great Catholic epic and Milton's "Paradise Lost" the great Protestant epic of the Christian era. "Othello" and "Gargantua and Pantagruel" are tragedy and comedy, respectively, neither epics nor concerned in the same way as Dante and Milton with Christian ideals.

Answer: Miguel de Cervantes

Cervantes, who like Shakespeare died in 1616, created Don Quixote, a great inspiration to later satirists and dabblers in the mock-heroic. Marlowe was a contemporary of Shakespeare with a significant body of dramatic works but he was not known for comedy or mock-heroics. Queen Elizabeth was a contemporary of Shakespeare but also otherwise preoccupied. Joyce came 300 years later.

Answer: It uses the Homeric apparatus to satirize the British elite.

Pope's early 18th-century poem certainly uses the language of heroic poetry and certainly does not mock Homer's heroes, whom were held in high esteem by Pope and his contemporaries. He encases the British upper crust in the Homeric apparatus to show how comparatively frivolous these people are -- the best they can do for a "heroic" act is when the hero boldly snips a lock of hair from the head of the haughty coquette.

Answer: T. S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock

Pope's Tibbald and Dryden's Mac Flecknoe indeed star in mock-heroic poems, but these poems appear two hundred years before Eliot's poem and (unlike the sample) are written in the heroic couplets typical of the period. Burroughs's narrator is not mock-heroic in any ordinary sense and does not evince the kind of self-loathing expressed in these lines.

Answer: Leopold Bloom is a mock-hero in that he is deliverer of neither himself nor his culture.

Joyce's "Ulysses" mimics the structure of "The Odyssey" (not "The Iliad"), but Joyce's Bloom falls spectacularly short of Homer's epic hero.

Answer: Brando's character is heroic in stature but mock-heroic in that he turns conventionally heroic values upside down.

Brando's Kurtz is a figure of tremendous power and charisma -- potentially heroic qualities -- but he has clearly drifted to the dark side. If Brando brings any residue into the film by virtue of his long and storied career, it is the aura of strong masculinity and moral ambiguity that he had developed through earlier roles.

Although outwardly a less imposing figure than Kurtz, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is the real hero, at least structurally, as it is he who rises through all manner of danger to complete the heroic task.