"Is it possible for the 'hero' of a narrative to be something other than a human being, or something given the sentience of a human being (a real animal like Kipling's jungle animals or an imagined creature like a unicorn or an alien)? Can it be something without sentience, such as an artificial creation, or even a setting?"
Part 4 of AGAIN SUPERHEROIC IDIOMS demonstrates that such settings as Jules Verne's "Center of the Earth" can indeed be the central focus of a given narrative, even if that narrative needs some awestruck human narrator to communicate the significance of that setting. But what of my other example, the nonsentient "artificial creation?" For the present I'll discount the potential examples of robots and androids, as they often take on either the appearance or the actuality of sentience.
Early American science fiction is certainly full of artificial anomalies,as summed up by Frank Cioffi:
“Status quo” science fiction. . . . opens with a conventional picture of social reality. . . . This reality is disrupted by some anomaly or change--invasion, invention, or atmospheric disturbance, for example--and most of the story involves combating or otherwise dealing with this disruption.
"Invention" is the sort of anomaly that I imagine Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch would have placed in the category he called "Man vs. Machinery." I see the appeal of this category, for in many cases machines, having been crafted by man, may be judged as things apart from "Nature" as such. However, in science fiction most fabulous "inventions" are fabulous not so much because of how man makes them (an operation usually left to the imagination) but because of what natural forces the inventions unleash.
Take for example Rene Clair's 1922 silent film, which was given the sort of English title appropriate to the milieu of pulp magazines: THE CRAZY RAY.
This short film, originally no more than thirty minutes (but slightly padded in some versions by distributors), takes a very Vernian approach to the "ray" of the English title. The mystery begins when an unnamed night watchman atop the Eiffel Tower descends and finds everyone in Paris deprived of motion. He wanders a city of statues for awhile until finally coming across a small handful of human beings still able to move, who explain that they just descended to Paris via a plane-- the common element being that of "height" here.
Both the shortness of the film and the Vernian approach assure that all of these characters are simple stereotypes; some, like the original viewpoint character, never even get names. After a few adventures in which the survivors motor around Paris enjoying taking things with impunity, they all become morbidly depressed at the lack of human society, and somewhat competitive over the one "living" female in their company. They're all saved from a dire fate when the author of the citywide paralysis, an experimental scientist, reveals that he unleashed the ray that froze Paris. However, after a little prolonged suspense about whether or not he can reverse the process, the scientist does so and the Cioffian anomaly comes to an end.
The viewpoint characters cannot be judged the focal presence of this narrative. They go through the motions of their mobility, so to speak, with the narrative emphasis being on the "what happened to stop the world" element. The scientist's invention, "the crazy ray," is the focal presence here, falling into the antagonistic position in the "man vs. nature" category.
In my next essay, having demonstrated that an inanimate object does not need to possess even the image of having sentience in order to be a focal presence, I'll turn to the only sort of inanimate objects who are *directly* relevant to the adventure-mythos and to the superheroic idiom within that mythos: the aforementioned android/robot creation.
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