John Proctor: Hero or Stooge?

How you portray John Proctor's actions is solely based upon how you define the words "hero" and "stooge". A hero is a man who is admired due to his courage. A stooge is someone whose purpose is to support, or assist, when dealing with unpleasant work.

So what is John Proctor?

In my opinion, I see Proctor as a hero; why, you may ask? Well, for starters he was one of the very few--alongside with Giles, Francis, and Hale (to a certain extent)--that actually stood up to say that Abigail and the other girls, including Mary Warren, were liars. Yes Proctor is mainly doing this for the sake of seeing his wife back with him again, but that's all it takes. He had the ability to stand up and call Abigail out for what she truly was: a lying, deceitful whore filled with envy and jealousy of a love she could not truly be apart of...a wife to John. That takes a lot of bravery given the fact that he just openly, though a bit reluctantly, professed that he had preformed adultery with her, and in a society where that is so heavily frowned upon...wow. That's a slap in the face for both Abigail and the court.

So to me he's a hero; he sees the horrid side of what their lives have all become and now, like in the end of Act III, he's basically saying he'll just sit back and watch everything unfold because they--in reference to the court--began to put Abigail on a high pedastal. He'll just watch the community crumble, uttering the final phrase: "I told you so."