Heroism Redefined

Introduction

The Malazan Book of the Fallen is a ten-volume argument about what heroism means, conducted against the grain of every dominant convention the fantasy genre has inherited. The series neither dismisses heroism as an illusion nor endorses it in its received forms; it redefines it, methodically, by subjecting each conventional figure of the hero — the Chosen One, the Great Man, the sword-wielding protagonist whose acts are witnessed and celebrated — to a sequence of countercases in which the received figure fails and something else (subtler, harder to see, often uncelebrated) takes its place. Steven Erikson has been direct about this project in interviews, describing himself as "obsessed with notions of heroism" and articulating a specific theoretical position: that the greatest acts of heroism in any human life are almost always unwitnessed, that the adulation normally accorded to military figures mistakes performance for substance, and that the unit of heroic action is not the individual but the collective.

This essay examines the Malazan redefinition of heroism under seven headings: Erikson's own articulation of the unwitnessed-heroism question; the deliberate dismantling of the hero's journey across the series; Mincer in Deadhouse Gates as the anti-aesthetic hero who looks nothing like a hero; the refusal of the Great Man theory and its replacement with a collective account of historical agency; Coltaine as the paradigm of ascension through mass belief; the soldier-getting-up-in-the-morning as the proposed lower-bound of heroic action; and the ethical consequences of this redefinition for the reader who reaches the end of the ten volumes.

The Unwitnessed Question: Erikson's Obsession

The central theoretical claim from which the Malazan treatment of heroism follows is articulated most directly in the Gardens of the Moon retrospective interview, where Erikson names the question that has driven his engagement with the theme:

"A lot of what epic fantasy and adventure stories are about is heroic acts, and usually it's heroic acts with a sword in hand or a knife, or saving the vulnerable people and all the rest — whether it's a damsel or whatever. But it always struck me that actually some of the greatest acts of heroism that are occurring all around us every day are not witnessed, they're not seen. Sometimes the act of getting up in the morning for a person can be the greatest act of heroism, because we just don't know — we don't know what they're going through, we don't know what they're experiencing on a daily basis. And I wanted to explore that side of things as well. And so even though it's a series centred very much on military campaigns, I did want to broaden the idea of what it is to be heroic. But there was always the dilemma, which was: can an act be heroic if it is unwitnessed? And it's a question I couldn't answer, because even when I created scenes that were ostensibly unwitnessed within the Malazan world, they were certainly witnessed by the reader — so it left the question unanswered." (Gardens of the Moon Chatting with Steven Erikson, Part 1 transcript)

Three features of this passage are analytically load-bearing. First, Erikson identifies the unwitnessed act as the limit case against which the received concept of heroism must be tested. Received heroism is constituted, in part, by its publicity: a heroic act is an act whose performance is visible to others and whose memory can be preserved in narrative. Erikson's challenge is to ask whether an act retains its heroic character when the publicity condition is removed. If it does, the received definition is defective (because it has been collapsing heroism into reputation); if it does not, the received definition is correct but excludes from consideration most of what Erikson suspects is actually heroic in ordinary life.

Second, Erikson acknowledges that the question cannot be definitively answered within the form of the novel, because fiction always witnesses its own events. The reader is the irreducible audience: any act depicted in a novel has been seen by whoever reads the novel, and therefore cannot be truly unwitnessed in the strict sense. The limitation is not a failure of the fiction but a property of the form, and Erikson's response to it is philosophically honest. Rather than pretending to resolve the question, he embeds into the series the recognition that the reader's witness is, for the characters themselves, a consolation they do not receive. The Bonehunters march toward their final confrontation believing no one will ever know what they have done, and the reader who knows otherwise is therefore participating in a bittersweet asymmetry: the reader's knowledge is the thing the characters would have needed to have, and cannot.

Third, the formulation "the act of getting up in the morning for a person can be the greatest act of heroism" is an explicit scaling-down of heroic action to a threshold that the received figure of the sword-wielding hero has always been too large to notice. Erikson is proposing that heroism begins not at the level of battlefield deeds but at the level of continuing to live at all when the conditions of living have become burdensome. The proposal is not merely rhetorical; it reshapes the entire definition, because if ordinary continuation under suffering counts as heroism, then the extraordinary deeds conventionally described as heroic are not the core of the category but a rare and often accidental subset.

Dismantling the Hero's Journey

The received template against which Erikson is working is most compactly captured by Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" — the monomyth Campbell argued was embedded in virtually every narrative tradition, in which a single protagonist is called out of the ordinary world, crosses a threshold, undergoes trials, acquires wisdom or power, and returns transformed. The template is flexible enough to accommodate almost any plot structure, but it has a specific ideological charge: it assumes that heroism is individual, that transformation is personal, and that the return of the hero brings some boon to the community left behind. All three assumptions have been naturalised in contemporary fantasy to the point where many readers experience them as structural necessities of the genre.

Erikson's series inverts all three. No single character in the Malazan Book of the Fallen completes the hero's journey. Some characters begin it and die before the transformation is complete (Coltaine, Whiskeyjack, Itkovian); others complete parts of it and fail the other parts (Karsa Orlong, Anomander Rake); others appear to complete it but under conditions that disqualify the completion from counting as the monomyth's return (Tavore, whose transformation is real but whose return is obscure and unacknowledged). The effect is to place the hero's-journey template in front of the reader like a set of tools and then to demonstrate that no individual character can wield all of them at once.

The critical move is that Erikson displaces the journey from individual characters onto the reader. The ten-volume span of the series is itself the hero's journey — the call to adventure is the opening pages of Gardens of the Moon, the crossing of the threshold is the moment the reader commits to the series' scale and density, the trials are the middle volumes in which the reader's patience is repeatedly tested, the wisdom acquired is the accumulated understanding that the received categories of fantasy have been inadequate to describe what the books are doing, and the return is the reader's re-emergence into ordinary life after the final page. The series is structured so that the reader, not any character, completes the arc. This is a formally remarkable move because it transfers the monomyth from the internal apparatus of the fiction to the relationship between fiction and audience, and it requires the individual characters to fail at the journey in order to preserve the journey's structural slot for the reader.

Mincer: The Anti-Aesthetic Hero

One of the most concrete dramatisations of the redefined heroism is Mincer, the sapper-captain whose belated introduction in Deadhouse Gates Chapter 19 Erikson has discussed in extensive craft detail. Mincer is the direct inversion of every conventional visual cue by which fantasy fiction signals a hero's status. His physical description (filtered through the historian Duiker's point of view) is relentlessly unflattering — "a squat, hairless, immeasurably ugly sapper, his eyes thin slashes, his nose a flattened spread of angles and crooks" — and his gear is an assemblage of cobbled-together oddities collected over a lifetime of service: mismatched armour, a helm from another continent, a battered and mangled shield-remnant with reinforced grips, a crossbow disguised as a bush. Erikson's interlocutor reads the description as an explicit anti-Hollywood move:

"Heroism is not about the good-looking handsome Hollywood A-lister who's standing there with their flowing locks and their piercing eyes and their square jaw. Heroism is about the act, and that act can be performed by anyone... [This guy] does not look like a hero, this guy does not have the accoutrement of a fantasy hero, he is the antithesis of the expected fantasy hero. It is a subversion of all of that, and yet in some ways it is far more realistic of what a competent veteran who is in the thick of it would be like... It reminds us that heroes are about what they do, not that they stand and look heroic, despite what Hollywood movies are all about these days — which is everyone looks the part. It's not about looking the part when you're actually doing it; it's about being able to do the part." (Critical Conversations 04: Chapter 19 Deadhouse Gates transcript)

The anti-aesthetic principle is clear, but what makes Mincer more than a one-note reversal is the craft detail with which his appearance is constructed. Every element of his gear has a history — the out-of-place helm implies he has fought in campaigns on other continents, the battered shield implies he has survived multiple engagements whose lesser participants did not, the camouflaged crossbow implies he has practised the specific discipline of not being seen at work. The description is therefore not an arbitrary list of unattractive details; it is the legible trace of a life spent doing the kind of work that produces the appearance Mincer presents. Every detail of ugliness is also a detail of competence, and the reader who attends to the description is being trained to read competence through the filter of appearance rather than being asked to ignore appearance in favour of competence.

The logical consequence is that Mincer's physical presentation is not accidental to his heroism but constitutive of it. A fantasy hero who looks the part is, by the same token, revealed to be someone whose work has not left sufficient marks on his body to prevent him from continuing to look the part — which means his work has either been light, or his good luck has been extraordinary, or he has been spared the ordinary consequences of action that would have altered his appearance. Mincer's appearance is the opposite: it is the appearance of someone who has done the work long enough for the work to have left its traces, and the ugliness is the archive of the deeds. The principle is that deeds leave marks, and the marks are incompatible with the received heroic aesthetic, and therefore the received heroic aesthetic is a fantasy about beings whose work is, by that fantasy's own logic, insufficient.

The Refusal of the Great Man Theory

Erikson's anthropological and archaeological training is directly relevant to his rejection of the Great Man theory of history — the view, associated with Thomas Carlyle, that history is made by a small number of exceptional individuals whose decisions and actions shape the events that lesser people merely experience. The theory has been out of fashion in professional historiography for most of the twentieth century, but it remains the default assumption of much popular fiction and especially of epic fantasy, where a single protagonist's decisions routinely determine the fate of continents. Erikson's refusal of this default is rooted in the archaeological observation that every material culture the discipline studies is the collective work of vast numbers of agents whose individual names are not recorded, and that the survival of any named "great man" is typically the survival of a figure whose visibility was produced by the collective labour of thousands of unnamed others.

The paradigm example Erikson has used in interviews is Winston Churchill — a figure universally credited with leading Britain through the Second World War, whose elevation to that role obscures the thousands of civil servants, soldiers, cryptographers, factory workers, merchant seamen, and ordinary citizens whose contributions were logically necessary to any of the outcomes Churchill is credited with producing. Without denying that Churchill mattered, the observation insists that his mattering was possible only because of the vast distributed labour whose visibility was sacrificed to make his own visibility possible. The same observation applies, mutatis mutandis, to every historical figure conventionally described as a Great Man. History is a collective achievement whose collective character is systematically obscured by the narrative habit of treating certain individuals as the agents and everyone else as the background.

This refusal has specific consequences for the Malazan series' treatment of its most conventionally heroic figures. Dassem Ultor, the First Sword; Anomander Rake, Son of Darkness; Whiskeyjack, the commander of the Bridgeburners; Coltaine, the Fist of the Seventh Army — each of them is presented with the apparatus the genre would normally use to frame a Great Man, and each is then systematically subordinated to the collective conditions that made their actions possible and often invisible. Whiskeyjack's standing depends on the loyalty of a squad whose names the reader slowly learns; Coltaine's achievement depends on the endurance of the refugees and soldiers who walked the Chain of Dogs behind him; Rake's centrality depends on the patience of a Tiste Andii people whose reasons for following him he is unable to understand. The Great Man is never alone in the frame; the frame is always crowded with the agents whose labour he is supposed to be standing in for. The series is therefore operating on a distributed theory of historical agency, in which the named hero is a legible projection of a collective work whose actual authorship is irreducibly plural.

Coltaine: Ascension Through Mass Belief

The most fully developed case of collective heroism in the Malazan Book of the Fallen is the Chain of Dogs, the months-long retreat across Seven Cities during which the Wickan general Coltaine leads a protected refugee column through increasingly hostile territory until both he and most of his command are killed at the gates of the destination they were never going to reach. Coltaine himself is the apparent hero of the story, but the text does everything it can to make clear that his heroism is inseparable from the soldiers, Wickans, and refugees whose sustained collaboration the retreat required. Coltaine cannot be the Great Man of the Chain because the Chain's survival is a function of the combined effort of tens of thousands of people, each of whose individual contributions is logically necessary to the outcome.

The series' subsequent treatment of Coltaine's memory extends this observation. After his death, Coltaine becomes progressively more prominent in the songs, stories, and religious imagination of the Malazan empire, and the accumulated weight of that collective memory eventually lifts him into something approaching ascendancy. But the ascension is not an award conferred on him for individual merit; it is the aggregate residue of a population's decision to remember him as the figure through which their own loss and survival can be narrated. The ascension is their act, not his. Coltaine becomes more than a man because a collective willed him to, and the collective willed him to because they needed a locus for the mourning and admiration that their shared experience had generated. The mechanism is sociological in exactly the sense discussed in the lesson on gods and belief: the collective's belief produces the ascension, and the ascension's legitimacy derives from its being the collective's own act of remembering.

The theoretical consequence is that "heroism" in the Malazan series is less a property of individuals than a relation between an individual and a collective. Coltaine's heroism is constituted by the collective response to his actions — the stories, the songs, the emotional attachment, the willingness of a population to organise their memory around his figure. If the collective response had not existed, the actions themselves would have been equally honourable but would not have become heroism in the sense the series cares about. Heroism is, therefore, something that happens to a person in retrospect, produced by the collective work of those who remember them, and the individual at the centre of the retrospection is a partial occasion for the heroism rather than its full cause.

The Soldier Who Gets Up in the Morning

The lower bound of the redefined heroism — the case Erikson named in the Gardens of the Moon retrospective — is the person for whom the act of continuing is itself a heroic achievement. This case is the most radical of the redefinitions because it detaches heroism from action-in-the-world altogether and relocates it in the sustained choice to remain alive and continue operating under conditions where the continuation is not owed. The principle is that some lives are difficult in ways no observer can see, and that the continuation of such a life is already the expenditure of heroic effort, regardless of whether the continuation produces any externally visible achievement.

In the Malazan series this lower bound is most visibly enacted through the portrayal of ordinary soldiers. The Bridgeburners and the Bonehunters are not heroic because of their great deeds; they are heroic because they continue to get up each morning in the presence of conditions that would justify their failing to do so. The series' willingness to spend hundreds of pages on the quiet interior lives of these figures — the PTSD, the grief, the exhausted humour, the small mercies extended from soldier to soldier — is the textual manifestation of the claim that the morning-getting-up is the unit of heroism. The battle scenes, when they come, are consequences of the underlying sustained choice rather than its cause.

The radical consequence is that the series is not primarily about combat at all. It is about the precondition of combat — the continued willingness of individuals to remain present to the conditions under which combat is required of them. The battles are the visible events that make the preconditions legible, but the preconditions are the thing that matters. A reader who focuses on the battles and misses the preconditions has misread the series. The morning-getting-up of any one soldier is the unit around which the entire thematic architecture is built.

"Who Are We Fighting For? Everybody. No Wonder We're Losing."

The series' most concentrated dramatic resolution of the unwitnessed-heroism question occurs in The Crippled God chapter 23, on the Spire — the final battle of the Bonehunters, the army that has marched to its death in defence of a god most of them have never seen and a cause most of them do not understand. The scene is staged as a brief exchange overheard among soldiers in the dark, in which three lines pass between voices the narrator cannot identify:

"Someone coughed nearby, from some huddle of stones, and then spoke. 'So, who are we fighting for again?'

Fiddler could not place the voice.

Nor the one that replied, 'Everyone.'

A long pause, and then, 'No wonder we're losing.'

Six, a dozen heartbeats, before someone snorted. A rumbling laugh followed, and then someone else burst out in a howl of mirth — and all at once, from the dark places among the rocks of this barrow, laughter burgeoned, rolled round, bounced and echoed." (TCG, ch. 23)

The exchange compresses the entire heroism theory into three lines whose attribution to no specific speaker is the formal point. The lines belong to the army itself rather than to any individual within it. The conventional fantasy answer to "who are we fighting for?" is some specific named cause — the king, the realm, the chosen one — but the Bonehunters' answer is "Everyone," delivered without irony, and the response — "No wonder we're losing" — is the recognition that a universal cause is, by every conventional logic, a losing one. Causes that are sufficiently universal cannot be defended; they have no enemies because they have no boundaries; their advocates cannot rally support because the support would have to come from the very everyone the cause is for. The laugh that follows is not bitter but generous: the laugh of soldiers who have seen the absurdity of their position with such clarity that the only available response is amusement.

But the scene does not end with the laughter. The narrator pulls back from the Bonehunters and follows the laughter to a different consciousness:

"Lying beneath the weight of the chains, the Crippled God, who had been listening, now heard. Long-forgotten, half-disbelieved emotions rose up through him, ferocious and bright. He drew a sharp breath, feeling his throat tighten. I will remember this. I will set out scrolls and burn upon them the names of these Fallen. I will make of this work a holy tome, and no other shall be needed." (TCG, ch. 23)

This is the moment in which the unwitnessed-heroism question is answered within the diegetic world rather than only by the reader's witnessing. The Bonehunters' acts on the Spire are unwitnessed by any human observer who will survive to record them. The army is dying; the cause is lost; the conventional witnesses are unavailable. But the Crippled God himself — the suffering, malevolent, broken deity for whom the Bonehunters have marched into oblivion — is listening. He has been "lying beneath the weight of the chains," powerless to act, but he can hear. And what he hears converts him from object of the Bonehunters' compassion into witness of their sacrifice. He vows to remember. He vows to record the names. He vows to make of their work "a holy tome, and no other shall be needed."

The structural elegance of this resolution is considerable. The unwitnessed sacrifice that Erikson admitted he could not "answer" within the form of the novel is, in the end, answered — but not by the conventional witnesses (commanders, historians, surviving comrades) who would be available in a normal heroic narrative. It is answered by the unlikeliest possible witness: the very god whose suffering occasioned the sacrifice, who has been the object of the heroic action throughout the series, and who now, in the moment of his rescue, becomes the witness whose recognition completes the moral structure. The witness is the rescued. The hero is everyone. The heroism is the laughter. And the witnessing is a god's vow to remember. This is The Crippled God answering Gardens of the Moon across ten thousand pages: the dilemma raised in interview thirty years ago about whether unwitnessed heroism is real has been dissolved by the discovery that the witness need not be human, need not be an outside observer, and need not arrive after the fact to record the deeds. The witness can be the very being for whom the heroism was performed. The act creates its own audience.

Frodo Should Have Died: The Witnessing Principle Inverted

A clarifying angle on Erikson's heroism theory comes from his repeated statement, in interviews, that Frodo should have died at the end of The Lord of the Rings. The position has cost him friends on convention panels:

"I'm convinced Frodo should have died. He should have gone down with the Ring, a hundred per cent. And the reason being is actually a fictional reason — it's a structural reason. All of Frodo's companions believed him dead, and so we got to witness their grief. If that grief is then held to be false or unrequired, then it takes the emotional impact away. I would rather see and feel that grief that they're feeling, knowing that he had given his life to get rid of the Ring. Anyway, I've had that argument on panels — I've offended so many people." (Gardens of the Moon 20th Anniversary Interview transcript)

The argument is more sophisticated than its provocative form suggests. Erikson is not making the standard grimdark complaint that fantasy needs more dead characters. He is making a structural argument from the same theory of witnessing that underlies his unwitnessed-heroism position — but applied from the opposite direction. The unwitnessed-heroism theory says: the worth of an unwitnessed act survives the absence of a witness, because the act has intrinsic value. The Frodo argument says: when an act is witnessed (by the companions, who believe Frodo dead and grieve him), the witnessing creates a moral fact in the world — and to undo the witnessing by reviving the witnessed-dead character is to falsify the moral fact. The companions' grief, which the reader has experienced as real, is retroactively revealed to have been unnecessary, and the emotional work the reader performed alongside the companions is rendered void. Tolkien's revival of Frodo, in Erikson's reading, betrays the witnesses by demonstrating that their witnessing was based on a false premise.

The two positions are the obverse and reverse of a single coin: heroism requires witnessing, and witnessing must not be falsified. The Frodo argument is therefore not a contradiction of the unwitnessed-heroism theory but its complement. Both insist that the witness is a moral agent whose work the text must respect, and both refuse the convenient narrative moves that would let the text off the hook of that respect. The Frodo argument also illuminates Erikson's contrasting approach to the deaths of major characters in his own series: Whiskeyjack, Itkovian, Beak, Trull Sengar, Brys Beddict — all are dead and stay dead in the moments their narratives have made their deaths matter. When they return (Hedge as a ghost, Brys through cosmic intervention), the return is psychologically complicated, treated with the seriousness it deserves, and never used to retroactively cancel the grief their deaths produced. Erikson does not raise his dead, because raising the dead steals from the witnesses the meaning of their witnessing.

Conclusion: The Reader as Final Witness

The cumulative effect of Erikson's redefinition of heroism is to place the reader in a specific and unusual position. Because the series' individual characters cannot complete the hero's journey on their own; because the aesthetic cues that would identify a hero in conventional fantasy have been deliberately disabled; because the Great Man theory has been refused; because heroism has been made a property of collective response rather than individual deed; and because the lower bound of heroism has been set at the level of daily continuation — the reader who wants to identify heroism in the series must become active in a way that reading most fantasy does not require. The reader must attend to the unwitnessed, notice the ugly veteran whose gear carries his history, register the collective conditions that make the named figures visible, and recognise the morning-getting-up as the unit of the entire apparatus.

This places the reader, at the end of the ten volumes, in the position of the final witness — the figure whose witness the characters themselves cannot receive but whose witness completes the moral structure the series has been building. The Bonehunters march believing no one will know; the reader knows. The failed commanders who gave everything and lost find no monuments within the text; the reader remembers them. The morning-getting-up of every soldier whose name is given and of every soldier whose name is withheld is sustained by the reader's willingness to care about what the characters' own world has refused to notice. The reader's position is therefore not incidental to the series' project but constitutive of it: the series becomes a work about heroism only because the reader is present to receive the witness the fiction's inhabitants cannot.

The redefinition is, in the last analysis, an ethical claim about reading. Erikson is proposing that fiction of sufficient seriousness can do something specific that other forms cannot — it can create a position (the reader's) in which the unwitnessed deeds of the deserving can be witnessed, and in which the witnessing is both available and consequential. Whether or not the reader's witness is metaphysically the "same kind of thing" as a witness within the fictional world is a question Erikson has explicitly left unanswered. What he has answered is that fiction can produce a structure in which the question is at least askable — and that asking it, across ten volumes, is what readers of the Malazan Book of the Fallen have been doing whether they knew it or not. The redefinition of heroism is also, therefore, a redefinition of what the serious long fantasy novel is for: not to celebrate the few whose deeds have been celebrated, but to provide the witness the many whose deeds have not been celebrated need.

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