JentooEnglish Literature

AP® English Literature and Composition · Character (CHR) — Skill Category 1, Prose Fiction

1.C Protagonist and Antagonist (CHR-1.Q, CHR-1.R)

The protagonist is whoever the story follows through its central conflict, and the antagonist is whatever pushes back against that person's wants. Neither role requires being good or evil.

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A story needs resistance before it has a shape. If the protagonist wants something and simply gets it, there's no tension to track, no reason to keep reading. The antagonist is the name for whatever supplies that resistance. It fills a structural slot, not a moral one. That slot can be occupied by a single rival, but it just as easily holds a society that enforces a tradition, a storm that wrecks a ship, or a protagonist's own fear working against their own plan. Whatever the protagonist has to push against to get what they want is doing the antagonist's job, whether or not it has a face.

Once you can name both sides of the conflict, you can usually see that each side stands for something. The protagonist wants, believes, or needs one thing; the antagonist's resistance comes from wanting, believing, or needing something incompatible. That incompatibility is where a story's values live. This is also why the antagonist is not automatically the villain and the protagonist is not automatically admirable: a story can ask the reader to follow a character whose actions are wrong, and oppose that character with someone whose objection is right. The arrangement of sympathy is a choice the writer makes, separate from the structural roles.

This connects directly to how characters reveal themselves through speech, action, and appearance, and to how foils work by embodying a contrasting value next to the protagonist. It also sets up the harder case: when protagonist and antagonist want the identical end, the conflict can't be about the goal anymore, so it has to live in the means, the timing, or the cost either side is willing to pay.

Key terms

Protagonist
The character whose wants and choices the narrative follows through its central conflict.
Antagonist
Whatever force opposes the protagonist's goal, whether a person, a group, nature, or an internal struggle.
Foil
A character whose contrasting traits or values throw the protagonist's own traits into sharper relief.
Structural role
A function a character or force serves in the plot's conflict, independent of whether that character is sympathetic or moral.

Watch it explained

  1. How it worksHow does the antagonist slot get filled by a person, a society, a storm, or the hero's own head?
  2. How it worksHow do a protagonist and an antagonist end up standing for two opposed sets of values?
  3. Worked exampleShow me who the antagonist is in The Lottery, where no single person opposes Tessie Hutchinson.
  4. Common mistakeWhy isn't the antagonist always the villain, and why isn't the protagonist always the good one?
  5. Going furtherWhat changes in a narrative when the protagonist and the antagonist want the exact same thing?

Check yourself

Your turneasy1 of 3
For the 9 weeks of the drought the village behaved as though Rennie's well belonged to the village. Nobody said so. The first morning a woman came with two pails and thanked him; by the second week there were 13 families at the gate before he was up, and the boy who had always carried water for the school now carried it from Rennie's yard. When Rennie fixed a chain on the gate, the vicar spoke to him kindly, and the shop found it was out of the things he came for, and the men at the forge stopped talking when he passed. What fills the antagonist's position in this passage?

End of topic.

Next: 1.C Foil Characters (CHR-1.U) →