Mosaic 46/4 0027-1276-07/075090$02.00©Mosaic The Anti-Hero in Modernist Fiction: From Irony to Cultural Renewal SHADI NEIMNEH T he hollow men speaking in the epigraph are not much different from Eliot’s famous Prufrock, the inadequate modern man whose introspection, self- deprecation, and hesitation are all emblematic of a new heroism. The hollow men are spiritually and culturally lacking in the substance of traditional heroes. However, they are aware of their communal, representative insignificance during the post-World War I era in Western culture—and even sing it. This lack of traditional heroism, what I call “anti-heroism,” is not particularly modern, as examples can be found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature. 1 However, modern anti-heroism in the early twentieth century is a response to the uncertainties of people about traditional values; it is a response to the insignificance of human beings in modernity and their drab existence; it is a feature of modernism and its zeitgeist. With rapidly changing This essay considers anti-heroism as a response to modern man’s uncertainties about traditional values and as a feature of modernity’s zeitgeist. Modern anti-heroism captures the sensibility associated with modernism, with its attempts at cultural renewal, and it ranges between the low mimetic and the ironic mode. Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men. —T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”