Bruce, narration: I'm having trouble grasping the reality of it. Hundreds of gamma bombs, all from my design. The potential destruction... good Lord. What could I have been thinking when I first created it? Could it be that there was some small, Hulkish part of me urging me on even before the accident? That the Hulk wasn't created by the blast so much as unshackled?
Rick Jones, narration: Y'know, most folks think that the Hulk is the incarnation of Bruce's anger. Me, I think the Hulk is partly Bruce's survival instinct. No matter how bad things are for Bruce... the Hulk wants to keep going. So the survivalist Hulk and the suicidal Bruce were at major odds.
These two quotes come from very different, but interesting points in the Incredible Hulk story line. The first one is from Incredible Hulk 345, the second from issue 467. They were published almost exactly ten years apart, in 1988 and 1998. I picked them both because they tie into a theory that I've always felt made sense for the Hulk's true origins: where he really comes from, and what he really is.
Now, the first panel nearly explains itself: Bruce and company have learned that the Leader, one of the Hulk's major enemies, has stolen a huge stash of gamma bombs, and that he plans to set them off in a small town called Middletown. Bruce, horrified that his research could lead to (more) destruction and death, wonders if the Hulk has always been a part of him, and the accident just made him that much harder to ignore.
The second panel is Rick Jones, Bruce's best friend, talking to a reporter about Bruce. By this point, Bruce has suffered the loss of Betty, his wife, and believes that her death from radiation poisoning is because of prolonged exposure to him. He's lost all will to go on, he's tried to kill himself in as many ways possible, but he survives because the Hulk is still there, still eager, even desperate to live.
I think Rick's right. The Hulk, or at least the most basic aspects of the Hulk, has one goal: to survive. But this isn't something that came from the Accident, nor is the Hulk a product of the Accident, not in a mental sense. The Hulk is the product of abuse, of repression, of internalizing everything, because if Bruce didn't have to look at it too hard, it didn't exist. As Bruce says, the Accident just brought all of that to the forefront, turning him inside out in a way that ensures that every morning Bruce Banner wakes up is a morning he has to deal with the Hulk inside him.
So the Hulk wants to live, because that's all a young Bruce could hope for. He couldn't bring his mother back, he couldn't fix his father, but he could live, and maybe that would be enough.
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