ABSTRACT
The difference between tragic heroes and comic heroes is sometimes difficult to define, but one suspect it has something to do with hanging. Whenever such virtues lose their flexibility and their concrete humanity, and freedom locks itself into an invariable commitment, tragic freedom becomes tragic inevitability. Comic heroes, like Marcolf, are thus exemplars of a special human freedom and flexibility-which, after all, is the real genius of the race. In literary terms, the themes of comic freedom, adaptability, and survival are the special emphasis of the picaresque hero, like the sixteenth-century Lazarillo de Tormes or Grimmelshausen's seventeenth-century Simplicius Simplicissimus. Comic heroism, with its flexibility and inclination to compromise, its playfulness and delight in ambiguity, its knowing winks and lighter countenance, is the more mature form. The comic hero playfully incarnates the essential contradictions of our natures, and the awkwardnesses and bewilderments of being human.
