Perfect Little Protagonists - Introduction

It’s almost always the case that the protagonist of a story is a “good guy.” That’s why the word “protagonist” is often used interchangeably with “hero.” Strictly speaking, though, a protagonist can be a “bad” person, as long as the reader still roots for him or her. Crime and Punishment features a murderer as its protagonist, yet Raskolnikov is more sympathetic as a murderer than the dogged and manipulative Petrovich who is the policeman investigating the crime.

Subversion and inversion of this concept of “protagonist = good” may be more common in novels aimed at an adult audience. But for children, this concept is sometimes taken to the extreme: the protagonists are perfect to the point of being annoying. This is especially true for older juvenile fiction (pre-1960s), where the “moral of the story” is so heavy-handed that the story itself is sometimes unreadable. 

One indicator of whether this is the case for a story is the author’s treatment of their antagonist. Just as the protagonist’s role is to serve as someone to root for, an antagonist is someone to root against. Maybe they’re not very evil--sometimes they’re normal people who just happen to be in conflict with the protagonist. For instance, Jane Austen’s Emma has Mr. and Mrs. Elton, who are not nice people but are certainly not guilty of any actual crimes.

Sometimes the antagonist isn’t a person at all, but rather a situation. In A Cricket in Times Square, there aren’t any villains for the cricket Chester to defeat. Instead it’s a matter of money—Chester is adopted by a boy whose family owns a failing newspaper stand, and it’s Chester who saves the day by making it a sort of landmark attraction. Similarly, Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web doesn’t have any enemies (Templeton the rat is annoying, but helps rather than hinders the heroes), but the fight in this case is against Wilbur’s mortality.

The problem with juvenile literature making the protagonists perfect is that the authors confine themselves to two-dimensionality in their characterizations. If the protagonists are perfect, then the antagonists must be evil. Or (possibly worse yet), the antagonists are simply led astray, and the protagonists feel sorry for them. It’s almost as if the authors are afraid that making their heroes dislike someone is too imperfect!

It’s been awhile since I did a series of character analyses, but because it so happens that several books I’ve read in a row recently have been of this sickly-sweet mentality, I thought I might as well bundle them up and review them all at once!