A Hero of Our Time was written in 1849 by Russian author Mikhail Lermontov featuring Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, an army officer and enthralling hero travelling through the mountain ranges of Russian Caucasus. The novel documents Pechorin’s travels in five short individual stories out of chronological order, of which can be understood and analyzed as separate wholes by the reader with no knowledge of the other stories. This special structure of A Hero of Our Time allows Pechorin’s character to develop as a Byronic hero over the course of the novel, with each story depicting a different side of Pechorin by the changing of narrator that offers a shift in perspective. These shifts in perspective are effective in showing the conflicting sides of Pechorin as a three-dimensional character, but gradually stripping Pechorin of his color as the reader learns more and more about him through the different …show more content…
Maxim Maximich has been living in the Caucasus for a long time and understands the lifestyle of the soldiers, interacting readily with the tribesman. It is Maxim whom introduces the character Pechorin to the reader, and the reader is then forced to see Pechorin through Maxim’s eyes. He is a side character, allowing the audience to decide the credibility in his words by being the second source of information. The narrator recounts all his words, and Maxim’s speaking voice seems to almost take over the narrator’s at one point. Describing Pechorin in a positive voice, Maxim pinpoints the first aspect of Pechorin’s odd personality, causing him to not be tired “after hunting the whole day in the rain and cold” while everybody else was freezing and exhausted. Yet, another time, Pechorin would “turn pale and freeze” by merely sitting in his room. In another example, Maxim recounts that he “couldn’t get a word out of him for hours on end”, then on the occasion