Heroes Themes

Heroism

The question of what makes a hero is asked all the way through Heroes, by many different characters.

• Before they even go to war, LaSalle is a hero to the kids of the Wreck Centre. He brings out the best in them and they adore him. Even at the end he is still making Francis feel better about himself, and prevents him from becoming a murderer. Is this more or less heroic than his war record? Francis is something of a peacetime hero as well – by becoming table tennis champion and beating LaSalle he becomes an icon to the other children.

• The scrapbook kept by the ‘Strangler’ at the St. Jude’s club contains newspaper clippings about all the ‘heroes’ of Frenchtown, including both LaSalle and Francis. The other men regard it as something of a symbol, something to be proud of, but Francis is ambivalent.

• The Silver Star is the only medal awarded for ‘heroism’, we are told. Both LaSalle and Francis have been awarded this medal, for saving the lives of their fellow soldiers. LaSalle does so by taking out a machine gun nest, Francis by falling on a grenade – the grenade that destroys his face. Is it significant that one wins it by committing an act of violence, whereas the other wins it by taking the damage himself? It impresses the townsfolk – but Francis wants to remain anonymous.

• Francis finds Arthur drunk outside the back of the St Jude club one night. Arthur is crying, because he is haunted by the war but nobody will talk about it. He scoffs at the idea of ‘heroes’ and says they were all just scared boys, and that there was no glamour involved. He says ‘We weren’t heroes. We were only there.’

This can be interpreted in two ways. One is that it is wrong for people to call them heroes, because they didn’t act like heroes. It was merely chance that they were there in the war. But when Francis remembers Arthur’s words right at the end of the book, it gives them a different interpretation. Francis is suggesting that merely by being there they were heroes – scared or not, they did what they had to do and did not run away.

• When Francis talks to LaSalle he admits that he fell on the grenade not out of heroism, but because he wanted to die, so he is not a hero. LaSalle counters this, by telling Francis that deep down it was an heroic act, driven by his instincts to save his fellow men. But it is LaSalle telling him this – can he be trusted?

• Francis tells us that he always wanted to be a hero like LaSalle, but that when he finds himself one he wants to get rid of the ‘fakery’. For him being called a hero can’t disguise what he feels underneath, the guilt at failing Nicole, and the fact that he wanted to die, so he feels like a coward. This links to the question that LaSalle asks at the end: ‘Does that one sin of mine wipe away all the good things?’ The whole book questions whether people can really be heroes, when they have all their human failings underneath.

• Why do Francis and Nicole not tell everyone the truth about LaSalle? Why does Francis tell no-one (apart from LaSalle) that he fell on the grenade because he wanted to die? When Arthur is drunk and crying about his wartime experiences, his two veteran friends pick him and take him home, not wanting Arthur to talk about the war. There seems to be a conspiracy not to reveal the heroes for what they are. Is Cormier suggesting that we need heroes, even if they are fake?

This is also suggested by the very positive effects of Francis beating LaSalle at table tennis. LaSalle knows that if the other children believe Francis has beaten him it will give them more self confidence. Although LaSalle fakes the result, Francis is a hero. Cormier is suggesting that even fake heroes can have a positive value in society.

• Nicole tells Francis that he should write about it, in order to find out what a hero really is. This suggests the answer to the question is in the book. But what is it? In the train station Francis thinks of the soldiers in his platoon who were scared, but stayed and fought anyway. They died and were never awarded medals, and he calls them the real heroes. This is a straightforward way of looking back at those who died in the war.

War

War ties into the theme of heroism as a useful motif – it is a time when people are often called ‘heroes’ but it is also a theme in itself. 

• Francis dreams of the German soldiers that he killed, but in his dreams they cry ‘Mama’ and he sees them as boys, like him ‘too young to shave’. In real life they didn’t have time to speak, but the dream emphasises a common idea in war literature – that the soldiers on both sides often have more in common with each-other than with their commanders.

• Throughout Francis never questions whether the war itself was just – he describes it at the end as the ‘good war’. However, the depiction of violence, and its effects, is quite brutal. The clinical and grotesque description of Francis’s facial injuries at the beginning of the novel is a good example of this. War is presented as horrifying and terrifying, with a massive effect on those who fight in it, but Cormier is not concerned with the politics of the war, nor does he make Heroes a pacifist novel.

• Arthur’s collapse behind the club one evening suggests that many of the veterans have similar issues to Francis – although Arthur appeared normal he is finding it very difficult to cope with the memories of what the war was like. Because he is physically unharmed, it is easier for him to pass as ‘normal’ than it is for Francis, but this episode shows that doesn’t mean the soldiers who came back in one piece are actually okay.

Innocence/ Loss of Childhood

• There are many points in the book which represent an ending of naïveté. One is a major event in American history – the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Francis notes that ‘We had discovered in one moment on a Sunday afternoon that the world was not a safe place anymore.’ This was not just their discovery, but the discovery of the whole United States, that they could not remain in isolation from the rest of the world.

• When Francis confidently leaves Nicole alone with LaSalle in the Wreck Centre, he does so in complete innocence of the danger she is in. Taking people at face value is something which the novel constantly warns us against – the apparently happy Arthur is found crying behind the St Jude club, and the villainous LaSalle ends by doing something positive for Francis, in affirming his heroism, and refusing to let him become a murderer.

• LaSalle’s rape of Nicole in the Wreck Centre is the end of innocence for both her and Francis, who waits in the dark knowing but unable to acknowledge what is happening to her. It is also symbolic of the end of their innocent belief in goodness – something that the war ended for many people.

• Francis going off to war with a faked age on his birth certificate is a significant step out of childhood – like many soldiers who signed up underage, he is forcing the issue. He notices that other soldiers – even the Germans – are also very young.

• He maintains a certain innocence even after the grenade – going to London with his face uncovered, he doesn’t think that other people will notice, until he makes a young boy cry. When he is home in Frenchtown he appears to have become very cynical, but at the end of the novel, he has turned back a little from that, perhaps coming to happy balance.

• The fact that Nicole will not see him again after the meeting they have at the end of the book also closes a door on the idea of there being a ‘happily ever after’: although she is surviving, and continuing to recover, she cannot go back to that state of innocence.

Love

• Francis’s love for Nicole is highly romanticised – his first meeting with her is compared to a knight kneeling at the feet of a saint. He can barely get up the courage to speak to her, although they do eventually go out, and their relationship is sweet and innocent.

• Later, in the army, he is motivated by both his love for her which has never gone away, and his guilt about his failure to help her when she was attacked. During the war his love and desire for forgiveness turns into the only thing that makes his life worthwhile. From the first chapter where he says ‘it would always be Nicole Renard’ to the penultimate one where he tells us the reason he went to see Nicole was to see if she could still be his girl ‘which could maybe change my mind about the gun in my duffel bag.’ This is verging on the obsessional, and Francis realises as he talks to Nicole that the love they had ended a long time ago.

• There is the hero-worship the teens feel for LaSalle before the war, and then that the town feels for the returning heroes. The scrapbook, the reception for LaSalle and the toasting of the Silver Star heroes in the St Jude Club all evidence this kind of love, and the need to find something or someone to admire to make life seem better.

• Much of what LaSalle did for the kids of Frenchtown, and Francis in particular could be described as loving: he makes Francis a more confident teenager, and continues trying to make him feel better about himself even after Francis has threatened to kill him. LaSalle also describes his sexual desire for young girls (‘sweet young things’) as love. He says ‘we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.’ This is a darker side to what ‘love’ can mean to different people.

• There is an element of brotherly or fraternal love in Francis’s memories of his fellow soldiers, in his remembrance of them every night. His sacrifice, of throwing himself on the grenade, could also be seen as a loving one – certainly LaSalle thinks that Francis’s instinct was to save his fellow soldiers, not to kill himself. There is a sense in which all the veterans are bound together by their experiences, which forms a kind of brotherly bond between them.

Forgiveness

• Francis is intent on taking revenge on Larry LaSalle, rather than forgiving him. He does not offer any forgiveness: when LaSalle asks if his one evil act can erase all the good he did, Francis coldly tells him to ‘ask Nicole.’ However, he does allow LaSalle to redeem himself a little by letting him take his own life. Is Francis’s drive to revenge more about LaSalle’s guilt or his own?

• Francis is driven by the need to find forgiveness for having let Nicole down by leaving her alone with LaSalle. The guilt of the action, and the fact that she blamed him for it, are almost overwhelming. He wants to die, and closes ‘doors to the future’ because he doesn’t feel he deserves either recognition as a hero or to live.

• The theme of forgiveness is set in the context of Nicole and Francis’s Catholic school, where they are taught by nuns. After the rape, Francis climbs the steeple to throw himself off, but cannot, at least partly because it is the ‘greatest sin’.

• Ironically LaSalle gives Francis a measure of forgiveness, when he tells him that he couldn’t have stopped the rape – he was just a ‘child.’

• Nicole offers Francis forgiveness in a very understated way. As it turns out she regrets blaming him for the rape, and tried to tell him so many years ago, but he had already left for the army. It is somewhat of an anti-climax, but the real person he needs forgiveness from is himself.

Concealment and Revealment (Hiding and Showing).

• Francis arrives in Frenchtown with his face wrapped up and concealed. On one level he’s hiding his injuries from sight, to stop them horrifying others like they did the small boy in London who cried. The idea of a face wrapped up in bandages recalls horror films of the early part of the twentieth century. It may deliberately recall the image of the Invisible Man.

• He’s also concealing his identity – he lies to Mrs Belander about how he knows her name, and the wrappings conceal whatever might be recognised. Francis is therefore able to walk around town completely unrecognised, except as a war veteran.

• Larry LaSalle also has a secret concealed in his past – the mysterious reason as to why he had left his showbiz career to become a youth worker. We never find out what this reason is, but it is implied by LaSalle’s referring to ‘sweet young things’ in the plural in his last encounter with Francis, that it was for something similar to his rape of Nicole. In the beginning this mystery seems attractive, adding to his ‘glamour’.

• This theme is exemplified by the structure of the novel, which weaves the three timelines together. Cormier uses foreshadowing extensively to create tension in the novel – such as when Francis tells us in the first chapter that he has ‘just prayed for the man [he is] going to kill.’ Then he gradually reveals different morsels of information, about Francis’s war experience and the pre-war life in Frenchtown.