This article will try to answer two questions : who is « the hero » ? And what is the relationship between the heroic and adolescence ? In order to find heroes in their original essence, the author turns to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and notices some fundamental characteristics which show that, deep down, the mission of the hero and the mission of the adolescent are one in the same. The two poems organized around narrative dimensions of siege and voyage represent rather well the lines followed by the adolescent experience. The paper turns on four interlinking themes in two dialectical pairs : Prehistory and History, the One and the Double, The Circle and the Ellipse, Life and Death.
From this perspective, the myth of the hero may be seen as the means by which it is possible to attempt a secular confrontation with death, a confrontation which paradoxically represents one of the cardinal points of the adolescent process.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 345-366.