Hero

January 23, 2026 — Pat Bertram

When does an author’s intentions become superseded by what is actually in the written book? I tend to think that as long as the book is unpublished and exists only in the author’s mind, then what is intended is what is. However, when a book is published and read, the author’s intentions no long matter — only the story the reader experiences counts.

This is especially true for the Wheel of Time books. I read an interview with Robert Jordan where someone asked if one of his themes was about women looking down their noses on men, and he said, “I’m not certain that I have a women-looking-down-their-nose at men theme; I simply have women that consider themselves competent in and of themselves.” They might be competent, but the truth is, whatever his intentions, almost all his women look down their noses on men, thinking men are nothing but wool-headed pieces of fluff who “think with the hair on their chests.” At best, the women seem indulgent or frustrated; at worst, contemptuous or even hateful.

In another interview, he said, “Egwene has had to give up the life that she’d assumed that she was going to live, and to adopt this other life in the name of the greater good.”

Some people do see Egwene as a heroic character, one who does give herself to the greater good, as Jordan apparently intended, but others see her as the embodiment of the dark triad of personality traits: narcissism (entitlement), Machiavellianism (manipulation), and psychopathy (lack of empathy). She pretends otherwise, of course, and sees herself as better than everyone else, especially better than the men heroes of the story. The men are all reluctant heroes, and they did have to leave the bucolic lives they led to save their village and ultimately the world. She didn’t have to leave. She just couldn’t stand that they were going to have adventures that she wouldn’t have, so she forced herself onto the expedition. All through the series, she lusts for power, seeks knowledge for the power it will eventually get her, and envies anyone having power she can’t have. Her ending is one of the few that actually makes sense in that senseless ending: She takes on more and more power (the power of the universe) until she destroys herself because she can’t let go of the one thing she wants. (Like the Gollum and his “precious” in The Lord of the Rings.)

Any good she does is purely accidental, a side effect of her power grab. Since she so often opposed the main hero, the one who was actually going to fight the last battle, once she gathered her forces, those who also opposed him, all he had to do was convince her of the rightness of his path, and then he held both sides (those who opposed him and those who were for him) in the palm of his hand. So in that case, she fulfilled her destiny, and died for the greater good, no matter what she was truly after.

And who knows, perhaps that was Jordan’s intention after all. To show that the reluctant hero ends up purposely choosing to do the right thing, and the gung-ho hero ends up only accidentally doing the right thing.

It’s funny that I think about these books so much. Most books are out of my mind as soon as the covers are closed, and rightly so. With too many novels, what you see is what you get. There is nothing beneath the thin veneer of the story, nothing to puzzle out, nothing to gain by ever thinking of them again. I’m still not sure if I like The Wheel of Time. There is so much that I don’t enjoy reading at all, such as anything about Egwene, not just her own point of view chapters, but also the chapters where other characters extol her (non-existent) virtues. Still, there are many, many layers in these books and I find it interesting to try to peel them all away to find the truth.

Assuming there is any truth.

Actually, that’s just specious. One particular truth shines all the way through the books, a truth that seems to fit our world as it exists right now. As Jordan said in an interview: “What you know as truth is not the whole truth. Sometimes it’s hardly the truth at all.”

Or as one of the hero’s mentors tell him: “You can never know everything, and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyway.”

Or, as Bernie LaPlante says to his son at the end of the movie Hero, “You remember when I said how I was gonna explain about life, buddy? Well the thing about life is, it gets weird. People are always telling ya about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or somethin’, and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn, as you get older, is there ain’t no truth. All there is is bullshit, pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life like when you get older is, you pick the layer of bullshit that you prefer and that’s your bullshit, so to speak.”