Being human, I learn from stories. These stories come in many forms—told by friends around a campfire, books, podcasts, movies, and so much TV.
Stories are an incredible tool for teaching and learning. We live vicarious adventures that take us through situations from the everyday to the totally bonkers, stories of people who seem like us, and stories of people we would never meet in real life. We can go to any time in the past or the future, anywhere on this planet or others. And in every one of these stories, we watch closely and learn a little bit more about how our world works and how we work.
This is incredible! And also, as with even the very best of tools, it comes with limitations.
Stories are told in narrative structures, which requires them to have a single1 protagonist.
This is one reason we find stories so easy to learn from: we, ourselves, move through life seeing the world from the single-protagonist point of view. It is our default mode of being. Watching stories from this perspective allows us to get vicarious “first-person” experience in situations we’ve never encountered. And given that we all have ways we need to grow and change, these guides can be quite helpful.
However, this single-protagonist limitation can become problematic, especially when retelling history in the form of a story, with that central protagonist. It turns out history was pretty much like the modern-day in its complexity and chaos. Sure, there are key players, but no human being has the power to shape the course of history by themselves.
When these stories are told, all of that complexity, chaos, and the sprawling, confusing cast of characters, tends to be massaged into some version of a “hero’s journey” centering the protagonist. The hero’s journey is a mythic form popularized by Joseph Campbell. It is the story of an individual being called to a challenge, meeting that challenge while facing various hurdles, and coming back transformed from their experience.
Another name for the hero’s journey is the “monomyth,” which I think is apt in both description and irony. It underlies the myth (in the pejorative sense) that a single individual is responsible for massive changes. Sure, some cogs are really big, but without the rest of the machine, they are just scrap metal.
Even the greatest hero has the proverbial feet of clay, which are compensated for by the tens, or hundreds, or thousands, or millions of people also working toward that cause, but in obscurity. In short, it oversimplifies the chains (plural) of events that had to come together to make any one thing happen.
Furthermore, this way of retelling has a tendency, especially with repeated retellings, to deify the protagonist. While some might considered that a compliment, in truth, it strips the person assigned the role of protagonist/hero of their humanity.
This is bad enough on its own, but worse yet, it subtly lets us off the hook. So-and-so did big things, but they were exceptional, while you and I, we’re just normal people. The truth is, so were they. Even the most exceptional human being is—wait for it—a human being. We have our flaws, but so did they. Everyone has room for self-growth, but we sure as hell can’t afford to wait until we are perfect to get started working toward the world we want to live in.
Finally, the monomyth carries inside it the implication that in order to have an impact, and especially a large or significant impact, we must be the leader. We must be the hero.
The best refutation of this nonsense I can think of is the character of Bear Smallhill from the brilliant show Reservation Dogs2 which follows the (mis)adventures of four teenagers living in a small town in the Muscogee Nation in rural Oklahoma. Throughout the three seasons, we watch Bear grow from a troubled teenager into a man. Bear is helped along on his journey by an irreverent ancestral spirit, William “Spirit” Knifeman, a fallen warrior who died at the Little Bighorn when his horse stepped in a gopher hole.
Throughout the show, Spirit shows up to teach Bear at critical moments. Bear even goes on a Campbell-approved hero’s journey including atonement with the father, being separated from his friends, spiritual aid, meeting a mentor in the desert, rescue from without (again, supernatural), mastering two worlds, and gaining the freedom to live. Mythology nerds rejoice!
Throughout the show, Bear has ongoing frustration and angst that he is not the leader of his friend group/gang, the Reservation Dogs. In the final episode, Bear and Spirit conclude their adventure with the following exchange:
Spirit: What have you learned, Nephew-Grandson?
Bear: I learned that I don’t got to be the only leader. That I’m from an amazing community and I’m just proud to be a part of it.
Spirit: Ah, there it is! Finally. You got it. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. We don’t need more chiefs, we need more warriors.
It is never one person who changes the world. We are not excused from doing what we can to improve our world because we are not “heroes” like we see in the movies. Each of us is a drop in the bucket, one single person in a sea of 8.1 billion others, and that is before we count every other living creature on this earth.
But we are all part of an amazing community, with our fellow people and creatures, on this massive, complicated marble spinning its way through the universe. We don’t need more “chiefs;” we don’t need more individuals who think they can solve it on their own. We need more “warriors,” more people who will come together with one another to build our community.
Let me end with another great line from that same episode3:
That’s ... the thing about community, is, you got to take care of it. You have to play your part.
Even stories told with multiple point-of-view characters will generally still have a single protagonist. Keep an eye out for who the stories keep coming back to or revolving around.
Watch this, seriously. It was made by FX and streams on Hulu. I think there might be a physical media release out? Anyhow, it is some of the best television ever made. It’s so good I dragged my feet for about 9 months before watching the final season because I wasn’t ready to let it go.
Also, if you’ve already seen Reservation Dogs and are about to tell me that there isn’t a single protagonist, there totally is. Community is the protagonist of the show, and there are three generations (plus ancestral spirits) whose journeys tell its story. That is why it is so different from every other show, and it’s why the writers managed to pull off such a complicated story with five main characters (one of whom is dead), more secondary characters than you can count on both hands, and an even larger group of tertiary characters. Again, every thread winds back to the single protagonist of the living organism that is the community.
Also also, how was I not an English major when this is the kind of question my brain won’t let go of?
This time it’s Hokti, the mother of the dead main character, Daniel, speaking to Willie Jack, who is second-in-command of the Reservation Dogs, and my favorite character.
“I’m just proud to be a part of it.” Brilliant!