I belief that Homer Simpson could be a Byronic Hero. Throughout the 28 seasons of the Simpsons, we see that Homer is a very selfish and ignorant man, but at the end of the day, there is good in his heart and we want him to prevail whatever may be in his way.
A Byronic Hero is a hero that is “so changeable, being… a strange melange of good and evil” (Byron 616). The hero could have many things we hate about the hero, but we will still root for them in the end. This hero is meant to have the reader find a “sense of self” (613) within the character, rather than being downtrodden by the perfect hero characters of stories before. Byronic Heroes are “imitated in life as well as in art” (613). Homer Simpson is a Byronic Hero in many ways. Throughout the seasons we see that Homer is not a very smart man, or a very caring man. He is an extreme alcoholic and he has a violent side. However, we also see that he has a soft spot for his friends and family, that he can be a good father, and that he loves his wife with all his heart. Most Episodes of the Simpsons start off with Homer being the cause of the main problem, and then learning how to fix it as the episode goes. Whether learning to be a more
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Before this time, all heroes were perfected people, but Lord Byron created a flawed hero. Someone who isn’t the perfect person, who can be wrong while still being right. It took heroes from being an unattainable thing to being something that a person can strive to be. Without the Byronic hero, our literature would not be the same, there would be no in depth characterization, because all the good guys must be perfectly good while all the bad guys must be perfectly bad. There would be only one note characters and one note stories. By creating the Byronic Hero, he created stories that not only have a greater depth to them, but that can also be more relatable for the