---
title: 'What Kind Of Hero Is Batman? (Part I)'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfz22vYBeIg'
video_id: 'sfz22vYBeIg'
date: 2026-09-20
duration_sec: 720
channel: 'Just Write'
---

# What Kind Of Hero Is Batman? (Part I)

> Source: [What Kind Of Hero Is Batman? (Part I)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfz22vYBeIg)

## Summary

This video is part one of a two-part series exploring the various heroic archetypes that define Batman, specifically as portrayed in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. It examines how Batman embodies the traits of three distinct literary hero types: the Classical Hero, the Tragic Hero, and the Romantic Hero, drawing on influences from figures like Hercules and Hamlet to illustrate his complex character.

### Key Points

- **Batman as a Classical Hero** [00:48] — Batman, like most superheroes, is an extension of Classical Heroes such as Samson and Hercules. While these heroes are known for strength and great deeds, they are also flawed. Superman, created by Seigel and Shuster, ironed out these imperfections, but Batman retains a more human version of these flaws, especially in Nolan's trilogy.
- **Batman as a Tragic Hero** [02:04] — Batman's character aligns more closely with the Tragic Hero archetype, as defined by Aristotle. A tragic hero elicits pity and fear, is not perfect but better than most, and faces downfall due to errors in judgment (hamartia), not vices. Bruce's refusal to kill Harvey Dent is cited as his fatal flaw leading to tragedy.
- **Bruce Wayne's Hamartia** [04:53] — Bruce's fatal flaw is his refusal to kill, specifically his failure to stop Harvey Dent. This error in judgment leads to Dent's death and the moral downfall of Batman, as he takes the blame for Dent's crimes.
- **The Tragic End** [05:24] — The tragic hero often experiences a total moral death rather than a physical one. Bruce experiences this at the end of The Dark Knight, becoming a 'dead man' in The Dark Knight Rises, which is thematically about his resurrection.
- **Batman as a Romantic Hero** [05:55] — The Romantic Hero, from the 19th-century Romanticism movement, is an outsider and rebel who wages war on society's systems. Batman fits this mold as someone placed outside civilization, representing a force against societal corruption.
- **Key Difference: Altruism vs. Egoism** [08:39] — Unlike typical Romantic heroes who are often egoistic, Batman is altruistic. He recognizes his own potential for evil and rejects the purely egoistic path of a Romantic rebel, as seen when he rejects Ra's Al Ghul's philosophy.

## Transcript

“So we'll hunt him. Because he can take it.” Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is marked by Batman’s ever shifting reputation
— transforming him from a mysterious figure in the night, to hero, to villain, to legend whose cultural identity is always Batman a far more mutable character than any of his peers.
In this video and the next one, I’m going to look at 6 heroic archetypes and parse out the many literary influences that have been melded together to form what we think about as Batman.
Batman as a Classical Hero Now, of course, when asking the question “What kind of a hero is Batman?” the obvious answer But, of course, the superhero didn’t spring fully formed out of the minds of Jerry Seigal
and Joe Shuster detatched from every kind of character that came before. When crafting Superman, Seigal said that he based his character on “Samson, Hercules and all Only more so.”
Samson and Hercules are what we’d call Classical Heroes and most superheroes are extensions These are characters known for their strength and their ability to perform great deeds, A key feature of the classical hero however is that they are flawed, often foolish.
Samson is overly trusting, and Hercules accidentally murders his family. In making Superman like these characters “only more so,” Seigel and Shuster ironed out these imperfections.
Superman’s only weakness, kryptonite, is external, not internal. In Batman we have a more human version of the Classical hero, but the kinds of flaws he exhibits, especially in the Nolan trilogy, more closely align with another type of protagonist
that is just as old as the classical hero: the Tragic Hero. Batman as a Tragic Hero Superheroes are often have a tragic backstory.
Exploded planets. There are few characters who experience as much tragedy as Batman does. But that bad things happen to him does not necessarily qualify Batman as a tragic hero.
For that, we have to turn to the ancient greek philosopher, Aristotle, who defined the character the classical hero. But the essence of what makes a character tragic, according to Aristotle, is when they
cause us to feel both pity for them, and fear for ourselves. Well, to figure that out, Aristotle outlines a few kinds of characters that DO NOT accomplish this.
So, if we watch a perfect man fail, it is not tragedy. “Nothing is more alien to the spirit of tragedy." If we watch an evil man fall, we will feel morally satisfied, but not pity or fear.
“Pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves.” So the tragic hero should not be perfect, otherwise we won’t relate to him, but he
should be better than most men, more capable and more moral. Tragedy will strike only because he makes “errors in judgement” or because of his In other words, their downfalls have to come as a result of their own actions, and often
as a result of actions they thought were morally correct, as opposed to vices. And the punishment has to be worse than the crime. He's a good, clever, respected nobleman whose fatal flaw or Hamartia is not that he contemplates murder, but that he contemplates murder
Had he killed Claudius immediately, he would have avoided catastrophe, but in waiting, in attempting to make absolutely sure he was acting morally, a bunch of other people die, including Nolan’s version of Batman, at least in The Dark Knight, owes a bit of a debt to
The deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne is the most glaringly obvious tragic moment in Bruce’s but it is just the start of his story, and tragic heroes are
The Aristotelian error of judgement that cements Bruce a tragic hero happens right here... "Come on, come on, hit me, hit me! Come on, hit me, hit me!
Bruce’s fatal flaw is his refusal to kill. Harvey Dent, Often, tragic heroes, like those in Shakespeare, will die at the end of their stories, but
Oedipus, for instance, who Aristotle calls the most perfect version of the tragic hero survives the play he is most known for, and doesn’t die until What’s more important, and perhaps even more tragic than a physical death, is a total
THAT is what Bruce experiences at the end of The Dark Knight. When we are reintroduced to him in The Dark Knight Rises, he is practically a dead man,
That film is thematically a resurrection of Bruce Wayne, and in order for something to be resurrected, to rise, it needs to have been dead and fallen to begin with. And it’s really not until the early 19th century that we start to talk about heroes
in other terms, with the emergence of the Romantic Hero. Batman as a Romantic Hero This term does not mean the hero of a romance story.
No, it comes out of Romanticism, a movement that emphasized emotion and individuality and which produced literary heroes that broke the mold of what we typically considered heroic. In contrast to classical and tragic heroes, who were often characters at the center of
leaders and warriors — the romantic hero is typically an outsider, a rebel. Someone who is waging war on society itself, its systems of justice, its materialism, its
The character is a reflection of the social disintegration, violence, urbanization and upheaval that defined the early 19th century as a result of the French and Industrial Revolutions.
Literary critic Northrop Frye wrote that this version of the hero is someone “who is placed outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often of leadership, that society
You can see the outline of Batman in that description. The Nolan trilogy really emphasizes that final part of the character, since Gotham is clearly a poorer place when it doesn’t incorporate Bruce's ideas.
In the Romantic Hero, those ideas come from someone who is engulfed in a sea of psychological “They are brooders or visionaries.” There is something, some idea or emotion, that this character has that sets them apart
from the world, and as a result of this separation, they are introspective, melancholic and often You can see all of these characteristics seep into the portrayal of Bruce Wayne throughout the
Dark Knight trilogy, but especially in the early parts of Batman Begins where his dissatisfaction with Gotham’s systems of justice sends him adrift in the world, on a journey His return to Gotham and and his subsequent war on crime mimics Edmund Dante’s transformation into the Count
Heights after mysteriously acquiring great wealth and both of their battles with the people who had wronged them. All of these characters are clever and intelligent, a necessary quality for someone who has diagnosed
the world as lacking, a quality that isn’t as necessary for classical or tragic heroes. But there is a key characteristic that separates Batman from the Romantic heroes. He's altruistic, not egoistic.
One of the earliest Romantic heroes appears in french writer Honoré de Balzac’s, Le Pere In it, a young man named Rastignac declares war on the cruelty of Parisian society. Raney Sanford says that “the limitations
The rebel who deludes himself that to plunder and exploit make him somehow different from those who with whom he contends can only be an adolescent figure. Without self perception, he sees all the irrational demonic forces in the world as outside himself
— a delusion that perhaps is the most limiting quality of the typical romantic rebel.” The character who thinks of society as corrupt without analyzing himself will also act in an immoral manner.
But if they recognize the potential damage of their own actions, they can rise above that Cristo when Dantes begins to regret his relentless pursuit of revenge and redeems himself
That moment of self-revelation happens much earlier in Batman Begins when Bruce regrets nearly killing Joe Chill himself. For the Romantic Hero, salvation comes not when they recognize the mutual goodness between
themselves and the rest of society, but when they recognize the potential for evil in both, and thus the need not to just wage war against something, but to produce something new as In rejecting Ra’s Al Ghul, Bruce Wayne essentially rejects being a Romantic Hero.
The quest of the Batman — to rid Gotham of crime — is too big and too fundamentally good to fit fully into the mold of the flawed rebel as seen in Romantic literature. So we may say that, in Nolan’s interpretation of the character, Batman has the personality,
the moodiness and darkness of a Romantic hero, as well as the outsider status, but that he At the same time, he accomplishes great feats of strength like a classical hero, and faces
terrible consequences for his errors in judgement like a tragic hero. In part two, we’ll dive into other archetypes of heroism in literature, and take a look
Until then, thanks for watching. Squarespace is an excellent all-in-one platform to build your website or online store.
It’s really easy to use, and there’s nothing to install, patch or upgrade. I made my website, justwritemedia.com, with Squarespace, and I got it to look exactly So it’s the perfect option if you’re on the go and doesn’t have any coding experience, like myself.
to start blogging, or any other reason start your free trail today by going to squarespace.com and go to squarespace.com/justwrite If you want to get more of my thoughts on writing and pop culture, follow me on Twitter
As always, many thanks to my patrons on Patreon for supporting this channel. If you want to help me keep making these videos, then head over to patreon.com/justwrite and Every dollar counts and helps ensure that I can devote the most amount of time possible
I’ll see you soon for part two. Keep writing everyone.