What Is an Antihero? A Protagonist You Are Not Meant to Admire

The word is used loosely and several distinct kinds of character are gathered under it. One is the protagonist who lacks conventional heroic attributes, being physically unimpressive, fearful or passive, which is the sense in which the term was first applied and which describes a great many modern novel protagonists. Another is the morally compromised protagonist who does genuinely bad things while remaining the character the narrative follows and, generally, the one the reader is positioned to understand. A third is the figure who achieves conventionally heroic outcomes through unheroic means, which is the vigilante and the ruthless pragmatist. A fourth is the character whose flaws are the point, where the narrative is an examination of them rather than an endorsement. Those are quite different, and confusing them produces most of the muddled argument about whether a given character counts, since a cowardly ordinary protagonist and a charming murderer raise entirely different questions.

The device exploits several features of how narrative operates:

• •Perspective generates sympathy, since a reader given access to someone's reasoning tends to adopt their point of view regardless of its merits, which is an effect writers use deliberately
• •Competence is attractive independently of morality, so a character who is good at something wins attention that their conduct would not
• •Explanation reads as justification, so supplying a background that accounts for behaviour tends to soften judgement of it even when nothing is excused
• •Contrast makes surrounding characters legible, since a compromised protagonist among worse people reads as principled
• •Recognisability matters, since flaws a reader shares are more engaging than virtues they do not
• •Uncertainty sustains attention, because a character who might do anything is unpredictable in a way a reliable one is not

Characters of this kind are not modern. Classical literature includes protagonists whose conduct is condemned within the work. Picaresque fiction from sixteenth-century Spain follows rogues through episodic adventures and is built entirely on the type. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels include numerous protagonists presented critically, and the Byronic hero of the Romantic period, brooding, transgressive and charismatic, is a direct ancestor of much that followed. Twentieth-century fiction made the ordinary or ineffectual protagonist standard, and the hardboiled detective established a figure operating by a private code in a corrupt world. The recent prominence of the type in television is a genuine shift and reflects the medium rather than the idea, since serial drama running for years can follow a character's deterioration in a way a two-hour film cannot, and a run of prestige series built on exactly that structure established it as the default for a period.

Several adjacent categories are frequently confused with this one and the distinctions are worth holding:

• •The villain protagonist, where the narrative follows someone the work presents as the antagonist of its own moral world, which is a stronger position than mere moral compromise
• •The tragic hero, whose downfall follows from a specific flaw and whose stature is assumed rather than questioned, which is a classical form and not the same thing
• •The unreliable narrator, which is a technique about how the story is told rather than a description of the character telling it
• •The picaro, an episodic rogue whose adventures satirise the society passed through, which is a genre convention with its own history
• •The Byronic hero, brooding, transgressive and charismatic, which supplied much of the aesthetic later attached to the type
• •The everyman, ordinary rather than flawed, which is frequently labelled an antihero and is simply a protagonist without exceptional qualities

Critics divide over whether the type illuminates or excuses, and both positions have substance. The case for holds that fiction is where moral complexity can be examined safely, that following someone unlike oneself develops understanding, and that stories presenting only admirable protagonists are both dull and dishonest about how people are. The case against holds that sustained sympathetic attention normalises conduct regardless of how the narrative frames it, that audiences reliably admire characters the work condemns, and that creators underestimate this. The evidence favours the second concern more than creators generally acknowledge, since fan response to several notable examples has celebrated exactly what the work presented as monstrous. A related complaint concerns distribution, since the space for compromised protagonists has historically been extended more readily to male characters, with female equivalents judged more harshly by audiences and commissioned less often, which is documented and frequently discussed by writers in the field.

The term covers the unimpressive protagonist, the morally compromised one, the ruthless achiever and the character whose flaws are the subject, and those raise different questions. Perspective generates sympathy regardless of conduct, and explanation reads as justification. Audiences reliably admire characters their stories condemn, which is the strongest version of the objection to the type.