Disambiguation

[truepenny]

Part II: protagonist/main character/hero

I got into a tangle in the comments to this post, and realized a little belatedly that part of the problem was that the person I was tangled with and I were not using the word "protagonist" in the same way.

And then I thought about it before, and realized that that's actually a rather fruitful syntactic tangle, between protagonist and main character and hero. So let's untangle it.

So. protagonist != main character != hero. They can be synonymous. The main character can be the protagonist can be the hero. But it doesn't have to work that way.

The distinct meaning of hero is pretty clear. The Good Guy. 'S why we have the term anti-hero, for a protagonist who isn't a hero.

And the main character--or characters--is the person or people the story focuses on.

But the protagonist ... the root of the word is the Greek agon, a struggle or contest, from the verb agomai, the same root as agony, agency, and action. In other words, the protagonist is the person who acts. But more than that, because agomai is a reflexive verb. The protagonist is the person who is acted upon. The person who changes.

That's why, in the tangle, I was saying that Ethan is the protagonist of Ethan of Athos, and Quinn isn't. Because Ethan changes, and because the novel is about the process of that change.

Comments

[larryhammer]

Hmm. Can you give an example of a story where the protagonist ≠ the main character? (I'd call Ethan both of those, for the record.)

Alternatively, which characters do you lable hero, protagonist, and main character in The Great Gatsby?

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, Quinn and Terrence Cee. I agree they're main characters, but they aren't protagonists.

And I would much prefer to ignore Gatsby as F. Scott Fitzgerald being a tiresome fluke.

(Not that I don't like the book, but.)

I don't think Gatsby has a hero. I'm not sure it has a protagonist either, since the point is that Gatsby, who is clearly the main character, doesn't change. Neither do Daisy or Tom. Does Nick change? Dunno.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

If Nick is who I think he is (it's been a while since I read Gatsby in high school), he's as close to a protagonist as that book gets. And there's definitely no hero there.

I'd say that most litfic hasn't really dealt in heroes since the era of Twain and Dickens, but I'm not sure if that assertion holds up to examination.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Nick's the narrator. So probably, yes, he is who you think he is.

I'm not sure, really, that litfic has ever dealt in heroes. Since one of those qualities that gets classified as literary is irony and ambiguity. Two qualities. Amongst our weaponry ...

[larryhammer]

So ... working my way through the Venn diagrams: there is always at least one main character; if there is one (and usually there is), a protagonist has to be a main character, but not all main characters are protagonists; there may or may not be a hero, and if there is, she must be a main character but need not be a protagonist. Did I get that right?

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Um, that looks right, but let's see if I can follow my own convoluted reasoning.

... with the proviso that I'm sure SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE, has contrived to write a story with no main characters (I haven't read it and I doubt I'd want to, but I bet it's out there), yes. A protagonist must be a main character (at least, if the story's to be satisfying at all), but a main character need not be a protagonist. A hero need not be either. The main character(s) may or may not be heroes; the protagonist(s) may or may not be heroes.

I suppose the main character of The Villain (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080097/)--like Wile E. Coyote--is main character as antagonist. But that kind of turns around into being a protagonist after a while. Sort of. In a weird sideways sort of way.

This is all very confusing.

[larryhammer]

I think that maps the same. Thanks. Useful (if slightly confusing) tools, there.

It could be argued that "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" has no main characters, but titular protagonists. And that Le Guin's story of bioanthropology reports has neither.

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I love "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" with a mad passion, but I'm not even sure it can be properly called a story. It has no plot.

Although, in the story behind the story, the Author of the Acacia Seeds is definitely protagging. Poor creature.

[larryhammer]

I classify it as a fictive thing we don't have a name for, along with Kim Stanley Robinson's alternate histories of the Enola Gay story/essay/thing.

Just as Always Coming Home is a fictive thing without a name.

---L.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to think if novels where the sidekick does all the narration count as stories with disconnected protagonist and main character. (Sherlock, for one.) The side-kick is technically a main character, and she tells you about the protagonist, but herself probably is not changing significantly in the process of the story.

[larryhammer]

Holmes is the hero, Watson the protagonist -- he does learn and change, in little bits, as he goes.

I think.

*reaches for more coffee*

---L.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think that describes a particular type of genre, where one character learns and grows and changes during the course of a story they tell about someone else. I would probably characterize My Antonia that way, for instance. That's a weird one, since the narrator sort of grows up in a normal way, and comes back to Antonia--who's had a much more conventional life--as a reference point of solidity.

What's especially weird about that story is that the outer narrator meets an old friend on a train, and they talk about Antonia, and then the friend comes back with a whole story, and the narrator reads it. So the framing narrator is neither hero nor protagonist nor main character at all. Rather like the way Laurie King frames her Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes stories, pretending to have found the manuscript elsewhere.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

By that standard, Hastings is a main character who is neither the hero (that's Poirot) nor a protagonist (because Hastings never changes at all). My evaluation of Hastings is "the vehicle for exposition" -- a character who constantly has to have things explained to him in words of one syllable or less, thereby allowing the author to get those things out in front of the reader as well.

(visiting via moontyger)

On an entirely different subject ...

[larryhammer]

... I assume you're familiar with Sidney's Arcadia? I've been burbling about it over in my journal, and would welcome any thoughts you might have.

---L.