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The Choices We Make MeiMei Liu Winning Piece, Whittier College English Department Scholarly Writing Contest 2018 “Heroes are made by the paths they choose, not the powers they are graced with.” (Ashton, Everneath) Contemporary writer, Brodi Ashton, whose young adult novel, Everneath, debuted in 2012 – thousands of years after Homer – is still concerned with the theme of epic heroes. Not so ironically – in our own very cynical times – Brodi is writing in the shadow of Milton. Her heroes, in this case the heroine of her novel Everneath, is defined not by her power or by some larger-than-life singular character trait, but instead by the choices she makes. Milton expanded the classical epic and redefined the epic hero in Paradise Lost by putting forth first and foremost the idea of character as defined by free choice – a legacy from which few writers have since escaped. No matter the age, no matter the changes through time, Milton’s innovations still prevail. Certainly Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, Beowulf, and the Red Crosse Knight all made choices – but they did so under duress. In Paradise Lost, however, the heroes often take paths of their own choosing when they are not forced to do so by being thrust into crises. These choices may, thereby, appear less dramatic at first but they prove to be more meaningful. Before it gave way to the novel, Dryden and Pope paid tribute to the epic poem by inverting the form – which had reached its pinnacle in Milton – in the service of personal and public satire. Both poets not only adopted epic form – with all its trappings – but also Milton’s theme that choice is paramount to the definition of the hero – for better or for worse. Milton expanded the larger than life classical hero to include all of humanity, not by using medieval allegory in which a single character, such as The Red Crosse Knight from Spencer’s Fairie Queene, stands in for the concept of humanity, nor by using a group of protagonists as Homer did in the Iliad, but rather by fragmenting the epic hero into multiple