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odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Anti-hero
This term usually refers to an unconventional central character who lacks the virtues of the traditional hero, but for whom we are to feel sympathy nonetheless.
Rouges, fools, and dreamers have made lively central characters and anti-heroes for hundreds of years. Cervantes' Don Quixote attacks windmills. Sterne's Tristram Shandy goes around in circles. Defoe's Moll Flanders inverts conversational morality. Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and Kafka's Joseph K. unsuccessfully confront the bureaucratic mechanisms and philosophical afflictions of modern life. Joseph Heller's Youssarian makes cowardice a form of virtue.
But a jerk is no anti-hero. If you want to write about boors and bigots, winos and whiners, you have to figure out a way to make these characters interesting and not merely incompetent or repulsive. If you don't, your readers won't care whether your character gets his art in the gallery or gets kicked out on the street, won't particularly want him to get the woman he claims he longs for, and might even be disappointed that she seems blind to his cretinism.
For an anti-hero to work as a protagonist, he needs saving graces. He might be a boozer, a brawler, or an irresponsible louse, but readers have to be convinced that he has some real talents or virtues. You want the reader to have some emotional investment in him. That takes some strategy. Just because the character tells us what a great and unjustly misunderstood person he is doesn't mean we will believe it. The opposite might be true. Characters in love with themselves do not come across as the most reliable of witnesses.
If you make your characters witty, or perceptive, or peculiarly thoughtful, readers realize that he may behave erratically but something worthwhile is underneath. If you let readers understand the circumstances that created his personality, so that his vices or crimes are understood as reactions to things that were done to him, sympathy results. That doesn't mean readers will approve his acts, but it does mean that they may care what happens to him, hope he mends his ways, are saddened by his setbacks, and feel that the experience of knowing him through fiction has been worthwhile. In Wright's tragic novel, Native Son, the main character keeps doing things that make readers thing, Oh no. Don't do that. But Wright provides an understanding that keeps readers emotionally engaged even as they are shocked.
Anti-heroes can be unwilling victims, wise fools, and innocent misfits who have been ostracized by their cultures and whose powerlessness gives them anti-hero status. They are comic saints and baggy-pantsed martyrs witnessing the corruptness of the world. Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim flops through the world of academia. In Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop is whirled through post-World War II chaos, losing his directions, his bearings, even his name. The unlikely hero of John Kennedy Tool's A Confederacy of Dunces is a hopeless anachronism. Through them you can see how vulnerability, sensitivity, or idealism can lurk inside problematic protagonists.
Anti-heroes afflicted with passivity are a problem. Victims can be main characters, but if they are passive, always acted upon rather than acting, they get tiresome. Readers tend to be first irritated and then bored by someone who just lets things happen to him time after time. The very narrative seems to lose energy, and a sudden upturn at the end can't save it. The worm must be trying to turn, even if it can only writhe.
The person you love to hate is another category of anti-hero. This is not merely a cad or a clod, but a character who is so energetically awful that you're fascinated by his evil schemes -- villains like Satin in Paradise Lost who are heroic in their villainy. Readers can become fascinated by malevolence, especially if they feel the character is his own worst enemy and, though he brings pain to others, he somehow always loses. Writers have often been disconcerted to find their cruel characters more memorable than their theoretically admirable heroes and heroines.
The old-fashioned hero and heroine aren't really taken seriously anymore as characters -- our notions of psychology and human behavior seem too sophisticated for such simplicity. So even your admirable characters will have some negative traits. You can use these flaws not only to make your characters more realistic, but also to make them more interesting, more complex, and, oddly, even more likable.
See Character, Hero, Picaro.
Anti-hero
This term usually refers to an unconventional central character who lacks the virtues of the traditional hero, but for whom we are to feel sympathy nonetheless.
Rouges, fools, and dreamers have made lively central characters and anti-heroes for hundreds of years. Cervantes' Don Quixote attacks windmills. Sterne's Tristram Shandy goes around in circles. Defoe's Moll Flanders inverts conversational morality. Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and Kafka's Joseph K. unsuccessfully confront the bureaucratic mechanisms and philosophical afflictions of modern life. Joseph Heller's Youssarian makes cowardice a form of virtue.
But a jerk is no anti-hero. If you want to write about boors and bigots, winos and whiners, you have to figure out a way to make these characters interesting and not merely incompetent or repulsive. If you don't, your readers won't care whether your character gets his art in the gallery or gets kicked out on the street, won't particularly want him to get the woman he claims he longs for, and might even be disappointed that she seems blind to his cretinism.
For an anti-hero to work as a protagonist, he needs saving graces. He might be a boozer, a brawler, or an irresponsible louse, but readers have to be convinced that he has some real talents or virtues. You want the reader to have some emotional investment in him. That takes some strategy. Just because the character tells us what a great and unjustly misunderstood person he is doesn't mean we will believe it. The opposite might be true. Characters in love with themselves do not come across as the most reliable of witnesses.
If you make your characters witty, or perceptive, or peculiarly thoughtful, readers realize that he may behave erratically but something worthwhile is underneath. If you let readers understand the circumstances that created his personality, so that his vices or crimes are understood as reactions to things that were done to him, sympathy results. That doesn't mean readers will approve his acts, but it does mean that they may care what happens to him, hope he mends his ways, are saddened by his setbacks, and feel that the experience of knowing him through fiction has been worthwhile. In Wright's tragic novel, Native Son, the main character keeps doing things that make readers thing, Oh no. Don't do that. But Wright provides an understanding that keeps readers emotionally engaged even as they are shocked.
Anti-heroes can be unwilling victims, wise fools, and innocent misfits who have been ostracized by their cultures and whose powerlessness gives them anti-hero status. They are comic saints and baggy-pantsed martyrs witnessing the corruptness of the world. Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim flops through the world of academia. In Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop is whirled through post-World War II chaos, losing his directions, his bearings, even his name. The unlikely hero of John Kennedy Tool's A Confederacy of Dunces is a hopeless anachronism. Through them you can see how vulnerability, sensitivity, or idealism can lurk inside problematic protagonists.
Anti-heroes afflicted with passivity are a problem. Victims can be main characters, but if they are passive, always acted upon rather than acting, they get tiresome. Readers tend to be first irritated and then bored by someone who just lets things happen to him time after time. The very narrative seems to lose energy, and a sudden upturn at the end can't save it. The worm must be trying to turn, even if it can only writhe.
The person you love to hate is another category of anti-hero. This is not merely a cad or a clod, but a character who is so energetically awful that you're fascinated by his evil schemes -- villains like Satin in Paradise Lost who are heroic in their villainy. Readers can become fascinated by malevolence, especially if they feel the character is his own worst enemy and, though he brings pain to others, he somehow always loses. Writers have often been disconcerted to find their cruel characters more memorable than their theoretically admirable heroes and heroines.
The old-fashioned hero and heroine aren't really taken seriously anymore as characters -- our notions of psychology and human behavior seem too sophisticated for such simplicity. So even your admirable characters will have some negative traits. You can use these flaws not only to make your characters more realistic, but also to make them more interesting, more complex, and, oddly, even more likable.
See Character, Hero, Picaro.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-29 03:26 pm (UTC)It was also nice to meet you at Dragon Con--if I haven't said that before, I'm sorry!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-30 01:36 am (UTC)