Anti-hero
Encyclopedia
In fiction
, an antihero (sometimes antiheroine as feminine) is generally considered to be a protagonist
whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal
hero, and is in some instances its antithesis
in which the character is generally useless at being a hero or heroine when they're supposed to be one. Some consider the word's meaning to be sufficiently broad as to additionally encompass the antagonist
who (in contrast to the archetypal villain) elicits considerable sympathy or admiration. The term dates to 1714, although literary criticism identifies the term in earlier literature.
. The antihero has evolved over time, changing as society's conceptions of the hero changed, from the Elizabethan
times of Faust
and William Shakespeare
's Falstaff
, to the darker-themed Victorian literature
of the 19th century, such as John Gay
's The Beggar's Opera
or as a timid, passive, indecisive man that contrasts sharply with other Greek heroes to Philip Meadows Taylor
's Confessions of a Thug
. The Byronic hero
also sets a literary precedent for the modern concept of antiheroism.
. Unlikely heroes are simply characters who may not be conspicuously flawed, but simply ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances.
"O Malandro"
A typical kind of Brazilian stock character who is often depicted as a trickster who lies, steals, and has little qualms about manipulating even his best friends. Despite this rather negative and villainous attitude, the malandro is often depicted as a hero because, in contrast to his methods, he does not use his cunningness for true harm and malice. Rather, he uses it to prevail against the adversity that surrounds the character, and his actions may actually have positive effects on the others, even if unintended, thus making him a sort of Lovable rogue
.
. Mid-20th century playwrights such as Samuel Beckett
and Tom Stoppard
showcased anti-heroic protagonist
s recognizable by their lack of identity and determination. Pulp fiction
and noir detective stories
of the mid-20th century saw characters such as Sam Spade
, who lacked the glorious appeal of previous heroic figures, become popular. Influenced by the pulps, early comic book
s featured anti-heroic characters such as Namor the Sub-Mariner (who would just as soon conquer human
ity as try to save it). Marvel Comics
most prolific anti-hero is perhaps The Punisher, who is more than willing to kill those who he views as deserving of death. Sergio Leone
's "spaghetti westerns" showcased a wandering vigilante
(the "Man with No Name
" played by Clint Eastwood
) whose gruff demeanor clashed with other heroic characteristics. Frank Miller
said that Sin City
character Marv is said to be the story's equivalent of an antihero. One of the more famous female antiheroes is Catwoman
, who was historically a supervillainess foe of Batman. Her usual crime was burglary, but she is not evil as she has her own moral code, and abhors killing. Catwoman has even, on occasion, helped Batman fight crime and villains in East End.
Many modern antiheroes possess, or even encapsulate, the postmodern rejection of traditional values
symptomatic of Modernist literature
in general, as well as the disillusion felt after World War II
and the Nuclear Age
. The continuing popularity of the antihero in modern literature and popular culture may be based on the recognition that a person is fraught with human frailties, unlike the archetypes of the white-hatted cowboy and the noble warrior, and is therefore more accessible to readers and viewers. This popularity may also be symptomatic of the rejection by the avant-garde
of traditional values after the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s.
In the postmodern era, traditionally defined heroic qualities, akin to the classic "knight in shining armor
" type, have given way to the "gritty truth" of life, and authority in general is being questioned. The brooding vigilante
or "noble criminal" archetype, seen in characters like Detectives Vic Mackey
and Dirty Harry
, is slowly becoming part of the popular conception of heroic valor rather than being characteristics that are deemed un-heroic.
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
, an antihero (sometimes antiheroine as feminine) is generally considered to be a protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal
Archetype
An archetype is a universally understood symbol or term or pattern of behavior, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated...
hero, and is in some instances its antithesis
Antithesis
Antithesis is a counter-proposition and denotes a direct contrast to the original proposition...
in which the character is generally useless at being a hero or heroine when they're supposed to be one. Some consider the word's meaning to be sufficiently broad as to additionally encompass the antagonist
Antagonist
An antagonist is a character, group of characters, or institution, that represents the opposition against which the protagonist must contend...
who (in contrast to the archetypal villain) elicits considerable sympathy or admiration. The term dates to 1714, although literary criticism identifies the term in earlier literature.
History
There is no definitive moment when the antihero came into existence as a literary tropeTrope (literature)
A literary trope is the usage of figurative language in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning...
. The antihero has evolved over time, changing as society's conceptions of the hero changed, from the Elizabethan
Elizabethan literature
The term Elizabethan literature refers to the English literature produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I .The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama...
times of Faust
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, commonly referred to simply as Doctor Faustus, is a play by Christopher Marlowe, based on the Faust story, in which a man sells his soul to the devil for power and knowledge...
and William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's Falstaff
Falstaff
Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare. In the two Henry IV plays, he is a companion to Prince Hal, the future King Henry V. A fat, vain, boastful, and cowardly knight, Falstaff leads the apparently wayward Prince Hal into trouble, and is...
, to the darker-themed Victorian literature
Victorian literature
Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria . It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century....
of the 19th century, such as John Gay
John Gay
John Gay was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera , set to music by Johann Christoph Pepusch...
's The Beggar's Opera
The Beggar's Opera
The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch. It is one of the watershed plays in Augustan drama and is the only example of the once thriving genre of satirical ballad opera to remain popular today...
or as a timid, passive, indecisive man that contrasts sharply with other Greek heroes to Philip Meadows Taylor
Philip Meadows Taylor
Colonel Philip Meadows Taylor CSI , an Anglo-Indian administrator and novelist, was born in Liverpool, England....
's Confessions of a Thug
Confessions of a Thug (novel)
Confessions of a Thug is an English novel written by Philip Meadows Taylor in 1839 based on the Thuggee cult in British India. Ameer Ali, the anti-hero protagonist of Confessions of a Thug, was said to be based on a real Thug called Syeed Amir Ali , whom the author was acquainted with.Confessions...
. The Byronic hero
Byronic hero
The Byronic hero is an idealised but flawed character exemplified in the life and writings of English Romantic poet Lord Byron. It was characterised by Lady Caroline Lamb, later a lover of Byron's, as being "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"...
also sets a literary precedent for the modern concept of antiheroism.
Distinction from unlikely heroes
The traditional hero type is classically depicted to possess an image that is larger than life. They are generally expected to be more physically attractive, stronger, braver, more clever or charismatic than the average everymanEveryman
In literature and drama, the term everyman has come to mean an ordinary individual, with whom the audience or reader is supposed to be able to identify easily, and who is often placed in extraordinary circumstances...
. Unlikely heroes are simply characters who may not be conspicuously flawed, but simply ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances.
"O Malandro"MalandragemMalandragem is a Brazilian Portuguese term for a lifestyle of idleness, fast living and petty crime - traditionally celebrated in samba lyrics, especially those of Noel Rosa. The exponent of this lifestyle, the malandro , or "bad boy" , has become significant to Brazilian national identity as a...
A typical kind of Brazilian stock character who is often depicted as a trickster who lies, steals, and has little qualms about manipulating even his best friends. Despite this rather negative and villainous attitude, the malandro is often depicted as a hero because, in contrast to his methods, he does not use his cunningness for true harm and malice. Rather, he uses it to prevail against the adversity that surrounds the character, and his actions may actually have positive effects on the others, even if unintended, thus making him a sort of Lovable rogueLovable rogue
The lovable rogue is a literary trope in the form of a character, often from a dysfunctional or working-class upbringing, who tends to recklessly defy norms and social conventions but who still evokes empathy from the audience or other characters. The lovable rogue is male and is often trying to...
.
In popular culture
Modern-day heroes have enjoyed an increased moral complexity. In 1930, originally introduced as a mysterious radio narrator by David Chrisman, William Sweets, and Harry Engman Charlot for Street and Smith Publications, The Shadow was fully developed and transformed into a pop culture antihero icon by pulp writer Walter B. GibsonWalter B. Gibson
Walter Brown Gibson was an American author and professional magician, best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow...
. Mid-20th century playwrights such as Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
and Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and...
showcased anti-heroic protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
s recognizable by their lack of identity and determination. Pulp fiction
Pulp magazine
Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...
and noir detective stories
Hardboiled
Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined...
of the mid-20th century saw characters such as Sam Spade
Sam Spade
Sam Spade is a fictional character who is the protagonist of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon and the various films and adaptations based on it, as well as in three lesser known short stories by Hammett....
, who lacked the glorious appeal of previous heroic figures, become popular. Influenced by the pulps, early comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
s featured anti-heroic characters such as Namor the Sub-Mariner (who would just as soon conquer human
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
ity as try to save it). Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics
Marvel Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American company that publishes comic books and related media...
most prolific anti-hero is perhaps The Punisher, who is more than willing to kill those who he views as deserving of death. Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter most associated with the "Spaghetti Western" genre.Leone's film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots...
's "spaghetti westerns" showcased a wandering vigilante
Vigilante
A vigilante is a private individual who legally or illegally punishes an alleged lawbreaker, or participates in a group which metes out extralegal punishment to an alleged lawbreaker....
(the "Man with No Name
Man with No Name
The man with no name is a stock character in Western films, but the term usually applies specifically to the character played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy."...
" played by Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood
Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide...
) whose gruff demeanor clashed with other heroic characteristics. Frank Miller
Frank Miller (comics)
Frank Miller is an American comic book artist, writer and film director best known for his dark, film noir-style comic book stories and graphic novels Ronin, Daredevil: Born Again, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City and 300...
said that Sin City
Sin City
Sin City is the title for a series of neo-noir comics by Frank Miller. The first story originally appeared in "Dark Horse Presents Fifth Anniversary Special" , and continued in Dark Horse Presents #51–62 from May 1991 to June 1992, under the title of Sin City, serialized in thirteen parts. Several...
character Marv is said to be the story's equivalent of an antihero. One of the more famous female antiheroes is Catwoman
Catwoman
Catwoman is a fictional character associated with DC Comics' Batman franchise. Historically a supervillain, the character was created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, partially inspired by Kane's cousin, Ruth Steel...
, who was historically a supervillainess foe of Batman. Her usual crime was burglary, but she is not evil as she has her own moral code, and abhors killing. Catwoman has even, on occasion, helped Batman fight crime and villains in East End.
Many modern antiheroes possess, or even encapsulate, the postmodern rejection of traditional values
Traditional values
Traditional values refer to those beliefs, moral codes, and mores that are passed down from generation to generation within a culture, subculture or community.-Summary:Since the late 1970s in the U.S., the term "traditional values" has become synonymous...
symptomatic of Modernist literature
Modernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
in general, as well as the disillusion felt after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
and the Nuclear Age
Atomic Age
The Atomic Age, also known as the Atomic Era, is a phrase typically used to delineate the period of history following the detonation of the first nuclear bomb Trinity on July 16, 1945...
. The continuing popularity of the antihero in modern literature and popular culture may be based on the recognition that a person is fraught with human frailties, unlike the archetypes of the white-hatted cowboy and the noble warrior, and is therefore more accessible to readers and viewers. This popularity may also be symptomatic of the rejection by the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
of traditional values after the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s.
In the postmodern era, traditionally defined heroic qualities, akin to the classic "knight in shining armor
Knight-errant
A knight-errant is a figure of medieval chivalric romance literature. "Errant," meaning wandering or roving, indicates how the knight-errant would typically wander the land in search of adventures to prove himself as a knight, such as in a pas d'armes.The first known appearance of the term...
" type, have given way to the "gritty truth" of life, and authority in general is being questioned. The brooding vigilante
Vigilante
A vigilante is a private individual who legally or illegally punishes an alleged lawbreaker, or participates in a group which metes out extralegal punishment to an alleged lawbreaker....
or "noble criminal" archetype, seen in characters like Detectives Vic Mackey
Vic Mackey
Detective Victor Samuel "Vic" Mackey, portrayed by Michael Chiklis, was the antihero and main protagonist of the FX crime drama series The Shield. Mackey was a corrupt and brutal Detective in the Los Angeles Police Department; he stole from drug dealers, routinely beat suspects and committed murder...
and Dirty Harry
Dirty Harry
Dirty Harry is a 1971 American crime thriller produced and directed by Don Siegel, the first in the Dirty Harry series. Clint Eastwood plays the title role, in his first outing as San Francisco Police Department Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan....
, is slowly becoming part of the popular conception of heroic valor rather than being characteristics that are deemed un-heroic.
See also
- AntagonistAntagonistAn antagonist is a character, group of characters, or institution, that represents the opposition against which the protagonist must contend...
- Byronic heroByronic heroThe Byronic hero is an idealised but flawed character exemplified in the life and writings of English Romantic poet Lord Byron. It was characterised by Lady Caroline Lamb, later a lover of Byron's, as being "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"...
- Tragic flawHamartiaHamartia is a term developed by Aristotle in his work Poetics. The word hamartia is rooted in the notion of missing the mark and covers a broad spectrum that includes ignorant, mistaken, or accidental wrongdoing, as well as deliberate iniquity, error, or sin...
- List of fictional antiheroes
- Tragic heroTragic heroA tragic hero is the main character in a tragedy. Tragic heroes appear in the dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Marston, Corneille, Racine, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Strindberg, and many other writers.-Aristotle's tragic hero:Aristotle...
- VigilanteVigilanteA vigilante is a private individual who legally or illegally punishes an alleged lawbreaker, or participates in a group which metes out extralegal punishment to an alleged lawbreaker....
- VillainVillainA villain is an "evil" character in a story, whether a historical narrative or, especially, a work of fiction. The villain usually is the antagonist, the character who tends to have a negative effect on other characters...
s - False heroFalse heroThe false hero is a stock character in fairy tales, and sometimes also in ballads. The character appears near the end of a story in order to claim to be the hero or heroine and is, therefore, always of the same sex as the hero or heroine. The false hero presents some claim to the position. By...
- False protagonistFalse protagonistIn fiction, a false protagonist is a literary technique, often used to make the plot more jarring or more memorable by fooling the audience's preconceptions, that constructs a character who the audience assumes is the protagonist but is later revealed not to be...
- ArchenemyArchenemyAn archenemy, archfoe, archvillain or archnemesis is the principal enemy of a character in a work of fiction, often described as the hero's worst enemy .- Etymology :The word archenemy or arch-enemy originated...
External links
- The Gallery of Anti-heroes and Villains: What is an Anti-Hero?
- The Gallery of Anti-heroes in Science Fiction Movies --- Explore-Science-Fiction-Movies.com