A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich | Literary Qualities
A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich takes a realistic look at life in the inner city. An all-too-human Benjie confronts a situation that defeats him throughout most of the book. Society's usual answers to the problems of poverty, racism, alienation, and drug dependency fail him. Childress challenges the term "hero" itself. The suggestion by Benjie and his social worker that a hero is a movie idol or sports figure is rejected in favor of Butler's insistence that he is the true hero: an ordinary human being who each day does what he must do to endure and survive.
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