¶ … Door in the Wall" our hero is Lionel Wallace. His heroism lies in his ongoing fight with his childhood memories and the knowledge that there is an easier way. He perseveres in life even though he feels the tediousness of it. Wallace is a tragic hero. The tragedy is that he gave into the choice when he was too young to understand and now must fight it every second, with its impact making his life more unpleasant.
The story revolves around Wallace's encounter with a green door when he is at the age of five or six. He enters this door and finds an enchanted world. On leaving this world, the memory of it haunts him for the rest of his life. We see Wallace encounter the door again and again, each time not entering it for different reasons.
Inside the door is both a paradise and an escape, an escape from the real world. The heroic nature of Wallace is that he rejects this escape and chooses to live in the real world again. His first encounter describes just how enchanted this world was, describing his feelings in the garden as "exquisitely glad -- as only rare moments and when one is young and joyful one can be glad in this world." This describes how much more pleasing this enchanted world was to him. On returning he describes himself as weeping with "ungovernable grief" and also describes how he longed for the garden, "Oh! Take me back to the garden."
However, later when he encounters the door again he does not enter it. In his teenage years he says this was not really from consideration...
Later, as he grows older we see that he considers the door more fully, each time choosing not to enter for a different reason. As he grows older still he sees the door more frequently and longs for it more. He describes his longing saying, "if ever that door offers it to me again, I swore, I will go in out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities...I swore it and when the time came -- I didn't go."
We also see the heroism in that, despite his longing for the green door, he makes a success of his life. The narrator describes his success saying, "when he was holding his attention to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an extremely successful man. His career, indeed, is set with successes."
It is noted also that in many cases it was in him not choosing the door that he found success. On the third occasion he passes the door on his way to getting a scholarship, later realizing "if I had stopped...I should have missed my scholarship, I should have missed Oxford -- muddled all the fine career before me."
The nature of this as a tragedy is that we also see how the door haunts him and makes his life less pleasant. The narrator describes it saying he was filled, "with insatiable longings that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him." The effect of this is shown where a woman that loved him says, "the interest goes out of him. He forgets you. He doesn't care a rap for you…
