Parties and How They Define Heroes

I love partying. I love hanging out with my friends and dancing and having a wild time. I enjoy meeting new people as well, because you never know what connection you might make with a stranger at a party. In fact, I went to a party at my friend’s house and while there, I struck up a conversation with a boy in my grade, but from a different high school, named Tom. And it turned out that Tom and I both had an incredible passion for science, and both of our future college majors were types of engineering. His biomedical and mine chemical. I guess I am pretty different from J. Alfred Prufrock. The man could hardly ascend the stairs to knock on the door to the party he was invited to. 

I do not understand what makes a middle-aged man with social anxiety a hero, even a “technical literary” hero. 

This is the largest issue I have seen in our Hero Unit. Where are the boundaries for what makes a hero a hero? For example, if Prufrock is a hero just for feeling anxious about a party, I must be quite a hero for having actually attended one, and having conversed with Tom while I was there. This issue is not an issue within literature; I believe the problem exists within literature analysis. And it is an issue because when we analyze works like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and qualify Prufrock as hero, does that not take away from the heroic nature of more fantastic heroes, such as Beowulf? I mean at that rate, any literary character is a hero. So is it even a distinctive title to be a literary hero anymore? No, it is not. 

I believe there were several characters in this Unit that were analyzed as heroes and should not have been, and among them stands Prufrock. Simply experiencing social anxiety is not heroic feat on its own. We all face it Prufrock. Some of us attend the party anyways, and I guess some of us write a poem about it instead.