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

[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.