You’re walking down the street, coming home from school, and all of a sudden you hear a shrill voice calling “Help! Help!” You run toward the voice and when you run about a block up the street you smell smoke. You look up and see a house totally engulfed in flames. You see a woman on the lawn of the burning building crying, “Help! Help! My baby’s inside!”
“Inside the burning building?” you ask. The woman nods her head up and down. You tell her not to worry, that you’ll save her baby. You run inside. Heat surrounds you. Your eyes sting and you can heardly breathe with all of the smoke, but you keep progressing because you know that you’ve got to save that baby.
You make your way up the stairs, flames jumping at you from everywhere. You hear a young, high-pitched voice crying. You look around and see the baby to your right in a play pen crying its heart out. You grab the baby and you’re about to walk downstairs when you see that the entrance to the stairway is blocked by a wall of flame. You run away from the stairs and search for another way out. You realize that you’ll have to jump out a window. You eventually find one. You’re hesitant, but you think that a two story fall shouldn’t be too bad. Besides, you’ve got to get the baby and yourself out of this burning inferno. You take a running start and leap out of the window. When you land, the wind is knocked out of you. As you get up, a news van that came to film the fire decies they should get the story of the baby’s rescue. You appear on the news and become a hero in your neighborhood.
Then you wake up.
You’ve been daydreaming. Dreaming that you were a great hero who accomplished an amazing feat; a Champion who has completed what most others would fear to have done. Most everyone longs for an opportunity to prove how courageous they are. They long to receive fame and glory for their heroic accomplishments. There are examples of this everywhere, in short stories such as, “The Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge,” written by Ambrose Bierce; examples in real life, such as the circumstances that Corrie Ten Boom experienced; and examples in plays such as “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe.
Short stories can prove to have perfect examples of people longing to show their bravery. In Bierce’s short story, which takes place during the Civil War, the main character, Payton Farquhar, is unable to participate in the Civil War and longs to prove that he is as brave as the soldiers in the Southern army. When an opportunity to be courageous arises, Farquhar quickly acts to prove how brave he is. He sets out to burn down the Owl Creek Bridge to hinder the Northern armies trade routes. When the Northern army found out, they hung Farquhar. Farquhar risked his life to appear brave to others.
People long to prove their bravery in real life as well. Cornelia ten Boom was a middle aged woman who lived in Holland during the Holocaust. Corrie, as her family and friends called her, helped save the lives of many Jewish lives during the Holocaust by hiding them from German officers and caring for them while they continued on long, hard journeys. When German officers suspected Corrie of hiding Jewish people, they took her to jail. Even though they never found any Jewish people in her home; they were hidden in a secret room. Corrie remained very brave in jail while she stayed in a bare dirty cell where the guards yelled at and taunted her.
Drama may prove to have perfect examples of people trying to be brave as well. In the play “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe there is a perfect example of a murderer trying to be brave. At the beginning of the play the murderer, who happens to be the narrator, tells how he went about murdering a man with an “evil vulture eye.” He insists that he was really only destorying the eye, that he only killed the man to rid himself of the dreaded gaping eyeball that had been haunting him. So, the way that I see it is that the narrator is trying to convince himself that he was brave enough to finally rid himself of the haunting eye that he may have been genuinely afraid of.
So, you see that there are examples everywhere of people who are trying to prove to themselves or to others that they are brave. You may have even caught yourself daydreaming of adventures where you prove to large crowds of people how brave you are. This is a normal experience to most, if not all, people. So remember that most people dream of proving their bravery and that you are not alone.
