Word: non-hero
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...both the question and the answer in British Playwright Henry Livings' parable of an upsidedown, inside-out non-hero of a boiler-room custodian in search of hallucinogenic mushroom caps...
...mildly deranged. He might have written his poems in peace here, but mama, newly widowed, reappears to lead him off to a last encounter-with the only blond man in a town full of Mexicans. The man robs and kills Norman-a fitting nonheroic end for an unfitted non-hero...
Manry is the most unprepossessing sort of adventurer. He was so much the non-hero that he told no one but his family about his plans and was genuinely astonished by the hero's reception that met him on the other side. The cruise cost him less than $2,000, a figure that includes the premiums for $50,000 in life insurance and what he put into Tinkerbelle. His most ambitious hope was to recover the cost of the trip by publishing...
...recent decades, talk of heroes seemed to carry overtones of tyranny, of Nazism's "supermen." In socialist mythology, the masses, not the individual, were regarded as heroic. In literature, the non-hero took over. He thrives in the U.S. today in the hands of such writers as Saul Bellow-whose Herzog has his great moment at the end of the book when he manages to summon enough strength to tell his cleaning woman to sweep the kitchen. Other literary "heroes" are fall guys, incipient madmen, badgered Everymen, victims. Their motto, says Daniel Aaron, professor of English at Smith, seems...
...SADDEST SUMMER OF SAMUEL S, by J. P. Donleavy. Once again Black Humorist Donleavy (Ginger Man) proves that he can make something of nothing-in this case a non-hero who has worn out his Viennese psychiatrist and baffled a predatory countess and a girl tourist in his Kafkaesque progress to nothingness...