In John Updike's "A&P," the cashier is not the unsuspected, nonconformist hero of the girls -- he is a coward. When "old McMahon patted his mouth and looked after them sizing up their joints," where was this hero but gazing on from the sidelines? When their backs are turned, from which shadows is he about to spring into action? Later, he comments: "That's policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile deliquency." And even now our cashier succumbs to policy. He is the kingpin's henchman, instructed to carry out the work of the Man. "Hero" is not something that one can claim from within, but instead something that others say of you.

In William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," Emily is a fallen monument to the "golden age" of the old South. First, there is "the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant -- a combined gardener and cook -- had seen in at least ten years." Emily's life was sheltered. She had a slave, of sorts, long past the end of the Civil War, left over by her father to serve after his death. "We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip ... she got to be thirty and she was still single." Even in his death, the father maintained strict rules for his daughter. She was the final artwork of that "golden age." It takes decades to drop old habits.