ABSTRACT
Heroes are not necessarily good people; they are, however, people of moral stature, people who command moral attention whether their acts are right or wrong. Prudence and knowledge are the enemies of heroism, and the hero in modern literature has succumbed to a series of attacks, first by the former and then by the latter. Too intimate a knowledge of a hero inevitably reduces his stature. The number of recent novels and short stories dealing with children and adolescents moving about in worlds half-realized indicates the degree to which the question of loneliness and love has come to haunt the modern imagination: the child in a grown-up world is the proper symbol of man in society, surrounded by the public masks of others just as he himself presents to others his own public mask. Knowledge thus dissolves value in explanation and substitutes inevitable loneliness for communion.
