Protagonist

RELATED TERMS: Actantial model – Greimas; Agon; Antagonist; Epic theatre – Brecht; (The) Heroic; Narratology; New Materialism; Theatre

The protagonist may sometimes be referred to as the main character, the focal character or the hero. In one sense, it is the actantiality around which the unfolding of the narrative unfolds: its movements and actions giving rise to counter-movements and counter-actions, creating a centre or point of return for the specific actantial dynamics and also, in many respects, the narrative’s deictic centre. For design practices, taking into account Greimas’ and Latour’s actantial theory, the actant by means of which the action centrally unfolds may not be a human ‘character’ but rather a place, an atmosphere, an institution, an organisation or a non-human life form which has agency in some respect.

For example, while Lear is clearly the protagonist in Shakespeare’s King Lear, it could also be said, taking into account the way agency is distributed by the plotting of the play, that the the force of nature, as embodiment of ‘the gods’ and their will, is the protagonist. In more contemporary examples, concerning ecological and environmental narratives and assuming a non-theological perspective, the protagonist might be the world’s oceans and their circulations, the atmosphere’s air and its flows or the earth’s oceanic and continental plates and their movements. These types of environments open up to the kind of thinking that takes place under the heading of ‘new materialism’, in which matter is not assumed to be passive and inert but active and ‘vital’, a problematic term which, in turn, opens up debates about what is meant by ‘material vitality’ (Bennett, 2010).

From another perspective, the protagonist is the character with whom the audience is intended to share the most empathy.

Empathy is a pivotal moment in engaging a reader, viewer or audience in the sequence of action in a narrative. The question of whether such emotional engagement is conjoined with an accompanying intellectual engagement or is treated as an end in itself, as part of an emotional catharsis, is key to the debate that Brecht, in establishing the ground for his ‘epic theatre’, develops with the Aristotelian view of tragic theatre.

The protagonist, while sometimes referred to as the “good guy”, in a pre-feminist or a pre-gender-neutral formulation, may be the clear villain or antihero of the piece.

Further discussion

In an interesting discussion of kinds of fictions, relevant for notions of the protagonist in design practices, Northrop Frye (2000: 33-34) argues that it is possible to classify fictions or narratives by the hero’s, heroine’s or protagonist’s power of action, which may be greater than, less than or roughly the same as that of the reader, viewer or audience.

Thus, in Frye’s scheme, if the protagonist is superior in kind both to other humans and to the environment of other humans, they are a divine being, and the story about this protagonist will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god.

If the protagonist is superior in degree to other humans and to the environment, the hero/ine is that of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is nonetheless a human being. The hero/ine of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are partly, but not wholly, suspended.

If the protagonist is superior in degree to other humans but not to the natural environment, the hero/ine is a leader. While this protagonist has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than the reader, viewer or audience, what they do is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero/ine of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and is the kind of tragic hero/ine that Aristotle had in mind.

If the protagonist is superior neither to other humans nor to the environment, the hero/ine is one of us. The reader, viewer or audience responds to a sense of their common humanity, and the world conforms to our own experience. This is the hero/ine of the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction. It may be difficult to retain the word ‘hero/ine’ for this type of protagonist, while such a character may not attain to the degree of becoming an anti-hero/ine.

If the protagonist is inferior in power or intelligence to the reader, viewer or audience, so that there is a sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration or absurdity, the hero/ine belongs to the ironic mode. This remains the case when the reader, viewer or audience feels that s/he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.

References

Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Frye, N. (2000). Historical criticism: theory of modes. In: Anatomy of criticism: four essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.