A sacrifice must be made: from Kierkegaard's tragic hero to the contemporary hero

In Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric (1843), the figure of a tragic hero is defined by the sacrifice he makes for the benefit of his community. To illustrate this concept, Kierkegaard presents three examples of influential fathers who have sacrificed their children: Agamemnon, Jephthah, and Brutus. In contemporary democratic societies, such a sacrifice would likely not be perceived as heroic anymore, since consciously sacrificing a human life is generally considered an unimaginable act. Thus, this article advocates that while sacrifice is still a key element for the development of contemporary heroes, the way it is executed has changed significantly since Kierkegaard’s time: if the tragic hero had to make a choice to sacrifice a loved one, for contemporary (anti)heroes like Marvel’s Deadpool (Miller 2016; Leitch 2018) or Disney’s Cruella (Gillespie 2021) sacrifice no longer presents itself in the form of a choice, but rather an unexpected event.