Image Of Child Heros :: essays research papers

Image of Child Heros The image of a child hero or â€Å"trickster† is seen in many cultures. This kind of role can tell a lot about how a culture acts and reacts to things. The idea of the child hero in stories written and told before the birth of Christ probably reflect the peoples beliefs that the child is the future, and therefore carries some sort of power or gift. For stories that were written after the birth of Christ, the child could reflect the idea stated above, or it could also be the peoples belief in an infant savior, that a child will make everything right again. Whether the story comes from before Christ or after, the one uniform aspect about these stories is that they are present in every culture, all around the world. The image of the â€Å"trickster† is also very prevalent in the different cultures. It is seen in many different fables and moral-based stories. â€Å"You cannot go against the Philistine, you are but a youth, and he has long been a man of war†(Metzger 145). This is what King Saul of Israel said to David when he proposed that he fight the Philistine warrior Goliath. The story of David and Goliath is quite possibly one of the oldest child hero stories. It was part of the Bible, in the Old Testament. In this story a young man named David proposes to the king of Israel that he fight and attempt to kill Goliath, the giant that had been plaguing Israel. The king agrees, however hesitantly, and David goes on to slay the beast using just a slingshot. While this story is not one that was made up, it still shows us that the ancient Hebrews believed in the fact that a child, or in this case teen, has the will and motivation to do the impossible. Staying on the eastern side of the world, we will next see examples of Russian stories. In the former Soviet Union, a lot of the time stories, books and other types of art were hard to come by. â€Å"In a broader sense, though, recent years have witnessed genuine cultural enrichment, as Gorbachevs glasnost policy permitted the works of previously forbidden writers, artists, and cinematographers to become accessible†(Grolier Multimedia). After the public was able to get at the mass of stories that had been kept from them, there was even more of an increase of books and other forms of art. The Russian people now had much more of an incentive to write. â€Å"In a certain village, not near, not far,