The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1987

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Story 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Story 8 Summary: “The Hero”

Julius is a boarding school student who makes a public defiant stand over the cafeteria food against the principal and headmaster, telling them, “I am not going to eat what you yourself would not willingly throw to your dog” (96). In a private meeting in the staff room, with the school’s 300 students waiting to learn his fate, the principal expels Julius, calling him “a dangerous element” (96).

Immensely proud, despite being kicked out of school, Julius struts to his classroom, where his classmates herald him as a hero. He is particularly happy to have impressed Dora, his deskmate on whom he has a crush. When the students ask what happened, Julius answers honestly, stating, “They just told me to go home and never come back” (95). The class is stunned until Dora laughs and says, “Oh, it’s only a joke” (95).

When the headmaster comes in to tell Julius his 10 minutes of goodbyes are up, Julius senses pity from Dora and the rest of his classmates, not the admiration he craves. Later that day, as Julius waits on the side of the road for a bus to take him home, he thinks to himself, “The only time he has ever been happy was when he was a school” (97), before erupting into tears.

Story 8 Analysis

In one of the shortest stories, Mungoshi relates the tale of a boy who is kicked out of school for going against the status quo. The story could thus be viewed as a cautionary tale of how formal education in Zimbabwe—of which Mungoshi is skeptical in many of the stories—is not conducive to independent thinking, nor does it shape young minds in a way he finds productive. Given the exceedingly low stakes of Julius’s complaints about the food, consider how the headmaster would have reacted had the student’s criticism been more substantive.

Yet this is also a story about a young man’s entitlement and desperate eagerness to please his fellow students. Far from being some kind of freedom fighter, Julius is driven almost entirely by a need to impress his peers. Even after he is doomed to expulsion, Julius relishes the attention his classmates shower on him, despite his knowledge that it will only last 10 minutes. Only after the high that accompanies this adulation is gone does Julius acknowledge the enormity of his mistake.