Must all Heroes go to Heaven?

Great literature, at least in the Western Cannon and at least until the twentieth century, was almost always redemptive. Macbeth could kill Duncan and wreak havoc only until  Malcolm arrived to put the world right. Hamlet’s death did not leave England bereft because Fortinbras remained to implement what justice remained once the murderous Claudius had been killed. A world permeated by Christianity, in a way that we cannot fully imagine, produces people who cannot be shocked at evil, for if there’s anything we see in the Old and New Testament, it’s the messy, manipulative, grasping nature of human beings. Cain murders Able, Jacob steals Esau’s blessing, and Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery.  We can only imagine what the un- chosen people of God were doing. Yet Cain built a great city, Jacob reaped what he sowed--thanks to Laban--and reconciled with his brother, and Joseph became second only to Pharaoh in Egypt and saved his family from famine. People reared reading and believing these stories and seeing the hand of a just and merciful God understand and believe in both the corruption of all people and the endless possibility of redemption.   I think when scholars say that authors such as Fitzgerald brought a kind of decadence to literature, what they mean is that, in the bleak twentieth-century world of literature, we see the fallenness and destruction of Tom and Daisy without justice or redemption, unless you want to argue that Nick becomes a kind of Greek chorus instituting literary justice by telling Gatsby’s story. I wouldn’t argue that point myself. After all, Tom and Daisy get away with murder and go on to leave carnage in their wake wherever they go. Hemingway’s lost generation is still lost, perhaps with a slight possibility of redemption—Jake realizes that some people have God.  As for postmodern writers who see the world as random, I would say that neither justice nor redemption can occur where randomness exists. My question is, can literature be truly great if characters have no hope of redemption—either secular or religious—or if all events are random? For redemption to be real, people’s choices have to be real, to count on some significant level, depending on whether the novel is secular or religious. (I don’t mean a work of art has to be Christian to be religious. The writer or characters merely have to recognize or believe in the possibility of a cosmic level of existence whether they reach it or not.) Writers should give this idea serious thought. If the struggle is hopeless and redemption impossible, then ultimately, writers have nothing to say. If, on the other hand, redemption comes too easily because the writer fails to grapple with whatever in human beings provoked the evil act to begin with, we have shallow genre literature, which might make a good read but has nothing significant to say either.  All heroes don't have to go to heaven--or the literary equivalent--for a literary work to be great, yet all of them must grapple, as must the author, with both the evil that men do and the redemptive grace that permeates lives and history.