When my publisher approached me to write Jack Bauer novels during 24’s first, Emmy-award winning season, it became my job to find a way into the heart of this fictional character. Over the years, pundits Left and Right have seen Jack as part of a larger political agenda. But as a writer, I couldn’t approach Jack that way — not if I wanted to bring him to life on the printed page.

So who is Jack Bauer? Among the ticking bombs and ticking clocks, what makes him tick?

On the surface, the man is easy enough to define. As deputy director of a fictional CIA Counter Terrorist Unit, he shares the thriller stage with a cyber-smart, heavily armed crew. The heart of Jack Bauer, however, isn’t found in a digital clock, computer virus, or high-caliber weapon. But for me, defining Jack as a character begins with understanding his place in a fictional pantheon, a tradition of rogue heroes that reaches all the way back to the genesis of story itself. While it might be a stretch to toss Gilgamesh into the mix, Jack does share many attributes with characters such as the wily Odysseus and the “outlaw” Robin Hood: men who triumph using their wits as often as their weapons. Violence may surround such men, but intelligence and the ability to strategize is what allows them to prevail far more than their ability to draw back a bow — or, in Jack’s case, draw a gun.

Jack’s more modern counterparts can be found in pop-culture icons like James Bond and Dirty Harry; comic heroes like Wolverine, Batman, and The Punisher; even Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian.

Like these rogue heroes, Jack possesses an internal beacon that indicates what’s just — a moral compass unaffected by the code of law, the rules of institutions, or the mores of society at large. Jack takes decisive action when he needs to. He cuts through the Gordian knots of social and institutional malaise, bureaucratic betrayals, and covert corruption. Jack will always strive to do the right thing, often without regard to his own best interest; and as was the case with the rogue heroes who came before him, not all of Jack’s actions will appear heroic.

Jack inhabits a fictional world, of course. Decoding and defining this “universe” became my job as well.

To capture the popular imagination effectively, all rogue heroes must exist in a world that to some degree mirrors contemporary reality. Take Conan the Barbarian: Writer Robert E. Howard created Conan in the early 1930s as a hero who battles his way through a long-lost (completely fictional) Hyborian Age. But these stories were more than disconnected fantasies. Howard himself admitted that Conan was a reflection of the gunfighters, outlaws, and con men he’d rubbed shoulders with in the rural, boom-and-bust Texas town where he grew up.

During his lifetime, Conan’s adventures were readily digested as popular pulp fiction, a kind of American fantastic noir that echoed the attitudes and themes of other Depression-era authors including Raymond Chandler.

Los Angeles gumshoe Philip Marlowe may not appear to have a single thing in common with Howard’s Conan, but at their cores the two are alike. Both soberly acknowledge the existence of darkness and corruption in their worlds, then use their internal codes to resist giving in to it and their wits to triumph over it.

While keeping those antecedents in mind for the core of Jack Bauer, I couldn’t help considering 24 as a sort of post-9/11 incarnation of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Back in the mid-Sixties, the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement seemed like a pretty cool place to work. Everyone was so dedicated and functional. Its boss, Alexander Waverly, was a jovial father figure, an employer you could count on when the chips were down. Even better, U.N.C.L.E. headquarters was staffed by a bevy of lovely young women. Best of all, you knew the enemy and it was THRUSH, not the guy or gal in the next cubicle.

But the world’s changed plenty since Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin hit the airwaves in the Swinging Sixties. The idealism that took America to the moon and promised Baby Boomers flying cars by the time they had driver’s licenses has been eroded by Vietnam, Watergate, and all the gates that followed, not to mention those airliners crashing into both Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a bucolic field in Pennsylvania. For generations that never experienced the hardships of the Depression or the heartbreaks of a world war, life suddenly became brutal.

It’s no wonder Jack Bauer’s 21st-century Counter Terrorist Unit has a very different culture than U.N.C.L.E. had (to put it mildly). In 24’s debut episode, Jack shoots a distrusted superior with a tranquilizer dart. Worse than that, in the course of his day, every organization and institution Jack Bauer encounters is either corrupt, incompetent, ineffective, or all three. On 24, the level of disillusionment — with government, business, and institutions in general — is off the charts.

Of course, popular entertainment being what it is, CTU (like U.N.C.L.E.) is staffed by a number of beautiful women. Rogue hero Jack Bauer has an extramarital affair with one of them, who turns out to be an enemy mole and murders his wife. The roiling paranoia inside CTU is so toxic, I came to the conclusion that the shark tank of office politics was on the creators’ minds as much as terrorism was. A lengthy creative conference with 24’s story editor — who told me that Ricky Gervais’s brilliantly squirmy BBC satire The Office played an inspirational role in 24’s genesis — confirmed my hunch.

Why does Jack do it? What compelled him to become a Delta Force operative, the leader of a Los Angeles SWAT team, a CIA agent, and finally a CTU Deputy Director? To put it bluntly, why does Jack allow himself to be used as a weapon by institutions he cannot trust?

Jack Bauer is an idealist. Despite the tragic reality of his world, Jack still believes in the dream of America, in protecting that shining city on a hill where there is freedom and justice for all. This faith compels Jack to act with society’s best interests at heart, despite the fact that a percentage of that society will always disdain him.

Granted, Jack’s CV would give anyone pause: proficient in: firearms, explosives, harsh interrogation techniques, torture, and assassination. From the outset I knew it would be hard to inspire and sustain readers’ empathy for such a character. But I found perspective in the writing of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, an expert in the field of human aggression and the psychology of combat, whose work has been used as a resource at the FBI Academy and West Point.

In On Combat, Grossman compares civilization to a flock of sheep. In that context, Jack is the sheep dog, the terrorists the wolves. Although the sheep fear the wolves and are guarded by the dog, the dog — with its fangs, claws and willingness to kill — has more in common with the wolves than with the sheep he protects. Despite the dog’s role as protector, he possesses the same predatory instincts and violent tendencies as the wolf, so he can never be a part of the flock. Jack is estranged from his daughter, constantly robbed of a normal life, admired by the audience but alienated by much of the fictional world he inhabits.

It’s no surprise Jack Bauer has become a lightning rod: In real life, soldiers and police are often similarly stranded on islands unto themselves, looked on with suspicion by some in the general public. Lately, however, it’s gone beyond wariness. We now live in a country where the brave men and women who’ve sacrificed to protect the people and ideals of this nation have become targeted for terror profiling by the very government they’ve put their lives on the line to protect.

I used to think Jack Bauer’s world was but a twisted version of our own. These days, I’m afraid our world is starting to look like Jack’s.

In the end, reams of paper might be filled analyzing who Jack Bauer is and what he represents. For me, however, the language of film provides the most succinct definition. When I think of Jack Bauer, I see a single iconic image — the final shot in John Ford’s classic Western The Searchers. In it, John Wayne plays the role of Ethan Edwards, a former Confederate officer. Ethan is a classic antihero, a man without a country. All that’s left of his connection to society is a family that has nearly forgotten him and finds his very presence unsettling.

Then his family is attacked. In the incident’s aftermath, Ethan dedicates years of his life to finding a young niece taken by the Indians. The road is hard and bitter, full of war, violence, and deprivation. But Ethan finds her and brings her back. The final shot reveals John Wayne standing alone and forgotten in a doorway, while the family he sacrificed to reunite closes the door on him.

Like Ethan, Jack Bauer is an archetypal loner who protects a flock he can never be part of. As with all our rogue heroes, fictional or real, Jack is willing to pay the ultimate price to defend those who often fear and even loathe him — until the day they need him again.

– Marc Cerasini has authored four original novels in the 24 Declassified series, as well as nonfiction works on military subjects including The Future of War: The Face of 21st Century Warfare, Heroes: Marine Corps Medal of Honor, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to US Special Ops Forces. His literary study of author Robert E. Howard, co-written with Charles Hoffman, will be reprinted in 2010.