An antihero typically exhibits one of the "Dark triad" personality traits, which include narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism. Antihero is a literary term that can be understood as standing in opposition to the traditional tragic hero, i.e., one with high social status, well liked by the general...
An antihero typically exhibits one of the "Dark triad" personality traits, which include narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism. Antihero is a literary term that can be understood as standing in opposition to the traditional tragic hero, i.e., one with high social status, well liked by the general populace, and possessing a tragic flaw. The first is that the antihero is doomed to fail before their adventure begins. To other scholars, an antihero is inherently a hero from a specific point of view, and a villain from another. This idea is further backed by the addition of character alignments, which are commonly displayed by role-playing games. Typically, an antihero is the focal point of conflict in a story, whether as the protagonist, or as the antagonistic force. This is due to the antihero's engagement in the conflict, typically of their own will, rather than a specific calling to serve the greater good. The concept has also been identified in classical Greek drama,Roman satire, and Renaissance literature such as Don Quixote and the picaresque rogue. The term antihero was first used as early as 1714, emerging in works such as Rameau's Nephew in the 18th century, and is also used more broadly to cover Byronic heroes as well, created by the English poet Lord Byron. Literary Romanticism in the 19th century helped popularize new forms of the antihero, such as the Gothic double. The antihero emerged as a foil to the traditional hero archetype, a process that Northrop Frye called the fictional "center of gravity". This movement indicated a literary change in heroic ethos from feudal aristocrat to urban democrat, as was the shift from epic to ironic narratives. Huckleberry Finn has been called "the first antihero in the American nursery". Charlotte Mullen of Somerville and Ross's The Real Charlotte has been described as an antiheroine. The antihero became prominent in early 20th century existentialist works such as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis ,Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea , and Albert Camus's The Stranger . The protagonist in these works is an indecisive central character who drifts through his life and is marked by boredom, angst, and alienation. The antihero entered American literature in the 1950s and up to the mid-1960s as an alienated figure, unable to communicate.