Characteristics of the Gothic Hero:
Old beyond their time
Wise beyond their years
Burdened by a secret guild or sorrow
Highly intelligent and imaginative
Proud, sardonic, reckless
Strong though sensitive
Conversant with alternate realities
Alienated, unconventional, a law unto themselves
Obsessive in their individual quest for self-realization
Ancient Greek:
Odysseus (See Homer's Odyssey and Tennyson's "Ulysses")
Oedipus (Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus)
Orpheus (Hesiod's Theogony)
Prometheus (Hesiod & Aeschylus)
Roman:
Aeneas (Virgil's Aeneid): Underworld, Dido, etc.
Old Testament:
Moses
New Testament:
Late Medieval:
Pilgram in Dante's Divine Comedy
Renaissance:
Doctor Faustus
Hamlet (Shakespeare's Hamlet)
The Hapless Pair--Adam & Eve (Milton's Paradise Lost; also the Fallen Angels)
18th. Century:
Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto etc.
19th. Century:
Werther (Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther)
Faust (Goethe)
Manfred (Byron)
Heathcliff (Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights)
Rochester (Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre)
Dr. Frankenstein (Mary Shelly's Frankenstein)
Count Dracula (Bram Stoker's Dracula)
Captain Ahab (Melville's Moby Dick)
20th. Century:
Kurtz and Marlow (Conrad's Heart of Darkness & Apocalypse Now)
Fox Mulder (X Files)