The hero and resistance to history

The hero and resistance to history is presented as the refusal to accept the ideas and habits of one’s own time, coupled with the attempt to bring a different age into being. The play gives that definition to a drunken stranger, then complicates it with the stranger’s noisy defiance of Mother Peep, his demand to be heard, and a briefcase that proves less like a heroic emblem than an object of comic confusion. Édouard’s warning draws the scene’s sharpest distinction: dissent may be heroic in thought and reckless in its public declaration.

A Definition Against the Age

The stranger appears in top hat and tails, dead drunk, carrying a briefcase. His first statement arrives broken by hiccups: he announces that he is for the rehabilitation of the hero. The grandness of the cause and the disorder of its spokesman are set beside each other from the outset. The play does not first establish him as a credible leader or an accomplished opponent of authority; it introduces a precarious, comic figure who nevertheless voices a clear political and historical proposition.

When Édouard asks what a hero is, the stranger answers that a hero is someone who dares to think against history and react against the times in which he lives. He expands the definition: a hero fights his own age and creates a different one. These statements make resistance more than personal eccentricity. The hero must oppose the assumptions of the present and imagine change, though the scene does not show the stranger creating a new order. His words state an ambition and a standard, not proof that he can fulfill them.

Defiance and Its Comic Setting

The stranger’s abstract definition immediately acquires a specific target: he shouts, “Down with Mother Peep!” His opposition is therefore voiced in the presence of Mother Peep’s political activity, rather than offered as detached reflection. The juxtaposition gives his account of resisting one’s times a concrete, confrontational form. At the same time, the play supplies no account here of his political program beyond this denunciation and his brief declaration of support for the hero’s rehabilitation. His resistance remains vivid but limited in what the scene establishes about its aims.

Bérenger calls the stranger blind drunk and searches the briefcase, taking out bottles of wine. The stranger replies that they are half empty and that this is not a crime. The exchange deflates the elevated language of heroism without simply erasing it: the would-be dissident is at once a political speaker and the owner of a case containing wine. The object that Bérenger treats as possible evidence yields bottles instead. Later, Bérenger says that the briefcase he is holding is empty; an old man follows and demands it back, and Bérenger says that it is not Édouard’s briefcase. The shifting claims around the case make its ownership and contents part of the scene’s confusion, not a stable foundation for heroic action.

The Risk of Speaking Out

The stranger repeats his self-identification—“I’m a hero! I’m a hero!”—then staggers quickly to the back of the stage and climbs the stairs toward Mother Peep. He insists that he does not think like other people and says he is going to tell them. His movement turns his definition into an attempt at public action: he does not merely claim an inward difference but advances toward the political figure he has condemned. Yet the stage direction preserves the imbalance between declaration and capacity. He is drunk, unsteady, and climbing toward Mother Peep rather than shown persuading an audience or altering events.

Édouard’s response captures the scene’s central tension. He says that thinking against one’s times is heroism, but saying so is madness. The distinction neither retracts the stranger’s definition nor endorses his manner of acting. Instead, it separates dissent as a way of thinking from the hazards of making dissent openly audible. The stranger’s urge to tell others may be courageous in intention, but Édouard sees the declaration itself as exposing him to danger or ridicule. The scene leaves that risk in view without showing whether the stranger’s speech will produce any political consequence.

The Ideal and Its Limits

The episode holds an ideal of resistance beside a deliberately compromised performance of it. The hero is defined by opposition to historical momentum and the creation of a different age; the figure who speaks for that ideal is drunk, preoccupied with a briefcase, and advancing toward Mother Peep with a repeated claim to heroism. That contrast makes the definition neither a simple endorsement of the stranger nor a joke that cancels his words. His disorder weakens his authority, but the substance of his challenge remains intelligible.

The scene also leaves open the difference between resisting an age and merely declaring oneself unlike other people. The stranger asserts both, but the evidence shows only his speech and movement toward Mother Peep, not a successful act of transformation. Édouard’s warning marks the cost of public dissent, while the stranger’s approach tests whether opposition can remain meaningful when it risks appearing absurd. Heroism emerges here as a demanding possibility—thinking against the present and attempting to change it—rather than a title secured by self-proclamation.