His inability to concentrate and control his reactions have made it pretty much impossible for him to function in a regular school, and so he’s enrolled in Yancy Academy, “the school for loser freaks who couldn’t make it elsewhere.” And now he’s about to be kicked out of there as well. His success—or lack of it—in school is a foregone conclusion. A prophecy.
Not only that, but Percy is also the child of an undereducated (albeit smart) mom, who is married to a brutish oaf of a man, Percy’s stepfather. Percy’s real dad is completely missing in action. Even without Percy’s issues with ADHD, his situation on the home front doesn’t give him much hope. All things considered, it would be easy enough to plant a big fat prophecy on Percy’s head, one that does not include things like college, law school, or a great job with benefits.
As it turns out, prophecies based on circumstances such as Percy’s are fairly easy to make, and all of them include the word struggle. From the very first page, even though there are no Olympians present, we can peg Percy. We know his type. We’ve met him in our classrooms, our neighborhoods, our soccer teams. Even without special powers, we can predict what is in store for someone like him: a lot of hard work. So it makes sense that even before Percy Jackson discovers that he isn’t completely human, he’s seen the future.
So what Rick Riordan has ingeniously done with Percy in his human world is to prepare him for the obstacles he’ll have to face as a half-blood. The challenges Riordan placed upon Percy in his younger life—his learning disabilities and his family situation—served their purpose of “toughening up Percy” for the obstacles, namely the monsters, he will be forced to face in each and every quest.
The very first prophecy the Oracle delivers to Percy is presented by his human familiars. As Percy recounts it: Gabe turned toward me and spoke in the rasping voice of the Oracle: You shall go west, and face the god who has turned.
His buddy on the right looked up and said in the same voice: You shall find what was stolen, and see it safely returned.
The guy on the left threw in two poker chips, then said: You shall be betrayed by one who calls you friend.
Finally, Eddie, our building super, delivered the worst line of all: And you shall fail to save what matters most, in the end.
The attentive reader will realize the Oracle is no dummy. Percy will face many monsters in his quests, but at this particular moment, the worst among them are the sneering men around the poker table, lead by his stepfather, Gabe Ugliano.
Annabeth comfirms this when she reminds Percy, “The real world is where the monsters are. That’s where you learn whether you’re any good or not.”
Percy’s genetics are at play here as well. Embedded in everyone’s genes lay a million small and large prophecies. Our penchant for music or science or art, the hand we write with, the way we laugh or cough, the turn of our feet when we walk—so much is decided before we’re even born. Suffice it to say that our parentage is the first factor in determining who we are, how we are, and the ways our lives turn out. (That said, I never inherited my mother’s third eye.)
The ADHD that caused him so many difficulties in the world of humans, it turns out, is a necessary trait for heroes. As Annabeth explains, “And the ADHD—you’re impulsive, can’t sit still in the classroom. That’s your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they’d keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that’s because you see too much, Percy, not too little. Your senses are better than a regular mortal’s.”
Thanks to his father’s DNA, Percy gains power from submersion in bodies of water. He can breathe underwater and communicate with the creatures of the sea. The water is his friend. From the moment he emerged from his mother’s watery womb, every cell in his body had a prophecy: born to swim! And throughout the stories, Percy uses these abilities time after time to rescue himself and his friends.
And speaking of friendship, this leads us to what may be the largest prophecy of all when it comes to Percy Jackson: his fatal flaw.
One of the trademarks of the stories given to us by the Greeks is the notion that every hero has a tragic shortcoming. Perhaps the most famous can be found in Homer’s The Iliad. Achilles, the hero of Troy, was the strongest, bravest warrior of all; his body could withstand any assault. He believed that he was immutable, unassailable, immortal. His only weak point on his entire body was his heel, and who knew anything about that? Sure enough, someone shot an arrow right into his heel, and that was the end of Achilles—and Troy too. From that day forward, our “Achilles’ heel” has been synonymous with our weak point, and nothing supposedly makes us weaker than a fatal flaw.
Percy learns about fatal flaws from Annabeth when she tells him about her own: hubris. “Hubris means deadly pride, Percy,” she tells him. “Thinking you can do things better than anyone else . . . even the gods.”
But why is a fatal flaw so instrumental in a good story? The Greeks inherently knew that the most important rule that a writer can never break is to “worry the reader.” Once we become aware of the hero’s weakest point, then we are constantly worried about whether or not the hero’s enemies will discover that weakness and use it against him or her. Once we know what the hero’s soft spot is, we can foresee—we can prophesize—that the hero will have to reckon with it. The flaw itself is where the potential for failure lies. You could say that a hero without a flaw is less than human. And therein lies the rub. Percy is more than human. He’s a half-god.
Unlike the Oracle’s pronouncements and Percy’s dreams, which to a great extent come from external sources, his fatal flaw is internal, something that comes from within. Annabeth’s mother, Athena, pegs it when she and Percy have their talk on Mount Olympus: “Your fatal flaw is personal loyalty, Percy. You do not know when it is time to cut your losses. To save a friend, you would sacrifice the world. In a hero of the prophecy, that is very, very dangerous.”
As Percy grows in both years and experience, he also makes more and more of his own choices. And at the end of the day, isn’t choice a distinctly human quality? Despite the circumstances of our births, our families, our economics, and our traits, humans continue to overcome even the direst of situations. Percy is part god, but he is also part human, and his loyalty to his friends is, at its heart, human. Will Percy’s very humanity turn out to be his greatest asset? Or his deepest flaw? At the end of book four, we are worried. Riordan has not broken this important rule.
It’s also true that one’s greatest weakness can also be one’s greatest strength. I’m not sure who said that, but in the meantime we can take heart in the fact that though we are all, like Percy, to a certain extent children of prophecies—whether those prophecies have to do with our genes, our circumstances, or whatever gods and goddesses (a.k.a. parents, grandparents, teachers, and—okay—higher powers too) look over us—we can make our own choices. We can face down those monsters in our paths. We can take whatever the fates have handed us and use it for the greater good. No matter what our bloodlines, we can still be heroes.
We can thaw out our eyeballs and focus on something besides our noses.
Kathi Appelt is the author of more than thirty books for children and young adults. Her first novel, The Underneath, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008. She lives in College Station, Texas, with her husband Ken and four adorable cats. She doesn’t have an Oracle in her attic, nor does she own a Ouija board. But she does read her horoscope every morning just to be on the safe side.
The Language of the Heart
Sophie Masson
When I was about nine, I had a horrible recurring dream. It was pretty simple. All I could see was a face, which at first was small and in the distance, but then got bigger and bigger till it seemed to be right on top of me. I couldn’t see a body, just a face. It was a monstrous face: very, very pale, almost gray-skinned, with big staring eyes so pale they seemed almost white and a thin pale mouth, that opened on to long yellow teeth tipped with red. Straggly hair that seemed to move and lift in an invisi
ble wind blew out around the face as if there was an electric current running through it, or as if each hair was alive and wriggling horribly. I always woke up just as the mouth opened wide on a terrible scream, and I’d be screaming myself, yelling my head off.
My mother would come running, but I was so scared of that dream I could not bring myself to tell her about it. I also thought that maybe if I said nothing, then I would forget it and it would go away. So I dreamed it three times before my mother finally persuaded me to tell her about it. As I described it to her, stammering over the words, I was suddenly filled with a frightening thought. What if telling her, describing the face in words, made it leave my dreams—but come into my real life? Or what if now I could never forget it, because I had fixed it in words, made it almost solid? I thought that my mother would tell me not to be scared, that it was just a nightmare, that it wasn’t real. That she wouldn’t understand what it was like to stand there paralyzed in your dream as the monster came closer and closer and you couldn’t move or scream or do anything at all. Except wake up. And then lie there worrying about whether, if you closed your eyes, it would come back.
But instead she said to me, “Did that monster remind you of anything?”
“Anything real?” I whispered.
“Real, or in a story.”
I thought about it. I loved stories. I loved reading them and listening to them and trying to write my own. I’d learned to read very early and spent as much time with books and stories as I could. My favorites were fairy tales, legends, and myths. The monstrous face could be like the wicked witch out of Hansel and Gretel. It could belong to some monster King Arthur killed. But as I thought about it, I knew what the monster actually reminded me of. Earlier that year I’d been given a marvelous book called Tales of the Greek Heroes, by Roger Lancelyn Green. It was about Hercules and Theseus and Jason and Perseus and others, the adventures they had and the monsters they had to fight. I loved that book and read it several times. I especially loved the story of Perseus, with its high glamour, its rich fairy tale atmosphere: the prophecy about Perseus’ birth, his mother Danae locked up in a stone tower by her father, Zeus coming to Danae in a shower of gold, the mother and child being cast away to die in the sea, the rescue by a fisherman, then Perseus growing to manhood, the magic gifts the gods and nymphs had given him, the way he rescued Andromeda from the dragon, and. . . .
Now I said to my mother, “I think it was like Medusa.” Medusa, the most terrible of the monstrous Gorgon sisters, with her snake hair and her cold, cold glance that would turn you to stone on the spot if you looked into her face. “But she was real, in my dream.”
“Of course,” said my mother. “She was real to Perseus too. What did he do to defeat her?”
“He used the shield Athena gave him like a mirror, so he wouldn’t look into her eyes and be turned to stone. Then he cut off her head,” I said promptly.
“Then,” said my mother, smiling, “you know what to do. Don’t be afraid. Just think about lifting up your shield and swinging your sword, and it won’t be able to hurt you anymore.”
Am I supposed to dream that? I thought, puzzled. Am I meant to try and make myself dream about defeating Medusa? I don’t think I can do that. I’ve tried to stop myself dreaming about that Medusa face, and I can’t. I’ve tried to make myself have nice dreams every night, and I can’t. But if I said I couldn’t do it, perhaps my mother would take away my beloved Tales of the Greek Heroes because it was too frightening for me, giving me nightmares. I didn’t want that to happen. So I said, “Okay,” as if I knew what to do.
That night I lay in bed worrying about it. I tried to will the picture into my head, of me holding up a shield as a mirror toward that horrible face so that I would dream about it when I fell asleep. But it felt silly. I wasn’t Perseus. I didn’t have a shield. Or a cap of invisibility or magic shoes, much as I wanted them. What would you use, if you weren’t an Ancient Greek hero and a horrible face haunted your dreaming self and turned it to stone, unable to move or run away? Then I thought, Of course! You’d just use an ordinary mirror. Not the big one in the bathroom that you couldn’t get off the wall, but a little one, like the one my mother had on her dressing table. I imagined myself picking up that mirror and holding it up in front of me. It didn’t seem like much of a weapon against a monster, but it would have to do. And what would happen next? Perseus had chopped off the Gorgon’s head with the strongest weapon in the world, the adamantine sickle the god Hermes had given him. I didn’t have anything remotely like that. My little brother had a toy sword, but a very small one, made of plastic. Not the kind of thing you’d want to use against an ancient monster. Not at all the sort you . . .
Worrying about it, I fell asleep. I didn’t even know I had, until the next morning when I woke up. The face hadn’t appeared in my dreams. It wasn’t because I’d forgotten what I dreamt. I never forgot it if the face appeared. But it hadn’t come. I hadn’t had to fight it, with or without the hand mirror and the toy sword. It just hadn’t come.
It didn’t come the next night, or the next, or the next. In fact, it never came back. Not once. I never forgot that dream, but I never had it again. I had other bad dreams from time to time and lots of good ones. (I still have lots and lots of very vivid dreams, some of which have gone into my books and inspired some of my stories.) I kept reading Tales of the Greek Heroes and every time I had a little shiver over the Medusa story. It was a kind of mixed shiver: fear mixed with pleasure. Pleasure because I thought I’d done what Perseus had, I’d defeated the monster. I did not have to literally fight it, with actual weapons. But I know that it isn’t coincidence it went away when my mother’s questions helped me to recognize the monster and think what I could do to fight it. And because of that, the dream-monster lost the power to frighten me. It vanished, never to return.
But the memory of that dream still lived at the back of my mind. Many years later, when I’d become a writer myself, I watched a really creepy old movie called The Medusa Touch (starring Richard Burton) about a guy who had Gorgon eyes—he could stop people’s hearts and make planes fall out of the sky like stones. And I remembered my Medusa dream. Though she’d never come back in a dream, I could still see that face so clearly. I’d grown up by then, and life had taught me that there were all kinds of monsters in the world, not just dream ones or ones in stories. I knew that some of them were not terrifying at first sight like Medusa but might wear normal or even friendly faces. I had come to understand that monsters lived in the human heart and sometimes caused people to do the most dreadful and horrific things, things that would turn you to stone if you thought about them for too long. Monsters might also be pitiable, like Medusa, turned to a ravening, hate-filled, vengeful monster by the gods because she dared to love who she must not love. The word we often use in our society for a monstrous personality is “psychopath,” a word that comes from two Greek words: psyche, meaning the soul, and pathos, meaning suffering, or sickness. So “psychopath” literally means “soul-sick,” as good a description of a monster like Medusa as any other.
I had come to realize that the amazing world of fairy tales and legends and myths, where gods, heroes, monsters, fairies, and witches share an enchanted and scary space, isn’t just about adventure and magic. It isn’t even just about monsters and defeating them. It has a lot to tell us about the world of flesh and blood and suffering and glory in which we live, and about our inner selves as human beings. These stories speak in the language of the human heart: a language of courage and terror, joy and pain. A language that is still intensely relevant. The old stories tell us about ourselves—what we are capable of, what we might do. We might not know exactly what it is like to be an ancient hero defeating a superhuman monster, but we all know what it’s like to be afraid of evil and danger. And we hope that, faced with a challenge, we too will take our courage in both hands and go out to do what must be done. We might not exactly be princesses shut up in towers by tyrannical fathers, like Perseus??
? mother Danae was. But we all know young people who are in similar sorts of situations in the everyday world. The old stories open us up to possibilities all around us.
Myself, I write fantasy, that inheritor of myth and fairy tale, because I feel it also speaks with the language of the heart. It possesses the realism of the soul, a heightened sort of realism where a hero can defeat a fearsome monster with his or her wits and courage, not just a mirror and a sword, and can learn all kinds of things about himself or herself while doing so.
I’d never forgotten Tales of the Greek Heroes. I’d often wondered why no one, including myself, ever used the Greek myths as background for fantasy novels. We used Celtic myths—a lot—Norse myths, Arthurian myths, and others, occasionally, including Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. But not Greek myths. And yet Greek myth is at the foundation of so many of our stories in Western Civilization.
I thought about it for a time. If I was going to write something based on Greek myth, I thought, I’d pick the story of Perseus. It had the right elements to make it really interesting. Perseus wasn’t a guy of extraordinary strength, like Hercules. He didn’t go seeking riches, like Jason, and betray the woman who had helped him. Besides, he was the one who had defeated Medusa, so I always felt close to him, because of that dream. And as well as Hermes’ sickle and Athena’s shield, he had those cool magic gifts from the nymphs: the Shoes of Swiftness and the Cap of Darkness, which made him invisible. You could write a really great updated version of his adventures, I thought. I’d get around to it maybe, one day, I mused vaguely. Very vaguely. There was always another book to write, another story that clamored to be written down first.
So imagine the mixture of delight and dismay when I first picked up Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief! But sweet delight very quickly won over sour old dismay. After a very short cross writer’s moment in which I thought, Blast, this guy’s pipped me to the post about an updated Perseus, I got thoroughly immersed in the story and the way in which the writer had been able to stay true to a good deal of the savage power and magic of the Greek original whilst also being able to totally bring the story into the twenty-first century. Riordan makes us really believe in Percy and his fellow half-bloods, troubled offspring of gods and humans, a world where Olympus is on the 600th floor of the Empire State Building; war god Ares is a red-eyed biker; the Delphic Oracle is a mummified Woodstock hippie; the three Fates knit the socks of Death; a Hitlerian Hades is defended by a (literal) skeleton army; and the Mother of Monsters, Echidna, chucks a hissy fit (most amusing to us Australian readers) about the “ridiculous animal” that bears her name in the Antipodes. A world in which a burger-cooking, seemingly sweet, veiled old lady with a warehouse full of fearful-faced stone statues is the dread Medusa. Dread, and deadly dangerous, but also pitiable. . . .