Chapter 2 presents Don Juan as an anti-heroic epic. The poem begins, ‘I want a hero,’ and it ends still in the same predicament, because Don Juan, the figure from the pantomime that Byron selects for his hero, so signally fails to fulfil that role. In Don Juan, I argue, Byron chooses a hero who fails to dominate his own poem, a hero who is always finding himself pushed to the sidelines of his own story, and that paradoxically is one of the conditions of his poem’s enormous success.