The Anti-Hero is Not an Anti-Hero

The anti-hero still functions in the story as a hero.

It’s about qualities, not function.

This is a note about the anti-hero.

The anti-hero is not an anti-hero. The anti-hero is anti-heroic.

The anti-hero is a main character who lacks heroic qualities. 

The anti-hero is not a main character who refuses to perform the functions of a main character.

I like to think of the anti-hero as an anti-heroic hero or an anti-heroic protagonist. The hero performs the function of the main character, which is to make the big decisions that drive the story.

The anti-heroic hero does exactly the same thing.

The anti-hero is not the antagonist, a sidekick, or a minor character. That is, they do not perform those functions in the story. The anti-heroic hero is the main character, but they do not possess the save-the-world traits of a typical heroic protagonist.

The anti-heroic hero is often cynical.

For a classic example, see Rick in Casablanca (1942). A man burned once too often for his idealism, he insists, “I stick my neck out for nobody.” He’s retreated from the world and, seemingly, only cares about himself. He’s funny, stylish, clever, distrustful, and cynical. However, like many a post-war “anti-hero,” he performs the functions of a traditional hero and even, by the end, sticks his neck out for a cause greater than himself.

If a typical hero story is about an innocent growing into a heroic figure, then an anti-hero story is about a cynic growing into a heroic figure.

You might argue that Deadpool is an example of an anti-heroic hero, and I’d agree, to the extent he has qualities that are not shared by, say, a hero like Captain America. In the comics (to my limited knowledge), Deadpool is a villain, then a hero, but always serving the function of a complicating force, a twisted perspective, a devil’s advocate in an argument. Maybe he’s sort of like V in V for Vendetta but not nearly as morally revolutionary. Deadpool is an assassin on the side of the good guys, a Dexter type; Deadpool is not an anarchist.

V is a pretty strong example of an anti-heroic hero, a hero pursuing a vision of a new society that society may not be ready for. He’s ready to sacrifice himself for a radical moral vision shared by only a minority. (The graphic novel is quite different from the movie.)

In the movies, Deadpool is much farther along on the journey to save-the-day heroism than, say, Rick in Casablanca. Deadpool may be sarcastic and knowing and, at times, a jackass, but he’s not cynical. He hasn’t given up, retreated, or become amoral. He also knows this, and says it aloud, in the movies themselves.

Okay, but what about an anti-hero who fails, who meets a bad end, who learns nothing, who remains an anti-heroic hero the whole story and dies worse off?

That’s called a tragedy. A story about someone who fails to learn from their experience is a tragedy.

Tragedies about anti-heroic heroes don’t have to end in death, but they tend to end with agents of society wresting control from the immoral individual. I’d hoped that the anti-heroic hero Frank Underwood of House of Cards would meet exactly that fate, ablaze in a finale like Scarface. The House of Cards series was set up (I think) as the rise-and-fall story of an anti-heroic protagonist. Life intervened, however, before the fall could be dramatized, at least in fiction.

Anyway, you can write a tragedy about any type of person, a heroic person or an anti-heroic person. Writing about an anti-heroic protagonist doesn’t determine the story you want to tell. You can start with any type of character and write a story of positive or negative transformation.

You do not have to write a tragedy because you want to write about an anti-heroic hero. You can write a story of growth.

A hard-boiled private eye becomes a romantic idealist. A cynic becomes charitable. A coward becomes brave. A criminal becomes king. A high-school science teacher becomes a drug lord. A general becomes a slave becomes a gladiator becomes the savior of Rome.

It’s up to you.

I prefer stories of positive transformation. It’s just in my DNA as a storyteller. It’s how I dream. So it’s how I write.

I didn’t understand the anti-hero at first. . . .

I wrote the following bits a while back, before I wrote the above section describing how I figured out an anti-hero is really a hero who isn’t perfect, who’s anti-heroic, but who nonetheless performs in the story the functions of the hero — the main character who drives the story with their dramatic choices.

But I didn’t get all that at first. The concept of the anti-hero was frustrating. I was musing to myself about the nature of the anti-hero because I just didn’t get it. What’s the difference between an antagonist and anti-hero? Is an anti-hero a reluctant hero or the opposite of a hero? And isn’t the opposite of a hero the villain?

Is an anti-hero immoral, amoral, evil? Is an anti-hero incapable of change, unable to learn, unwilling to adapt? Is the nature of the anti-hero dependent on the time period and the culture? 

Is one generation’s anti-hero the next generation’s cranky old man?

Maybe the anti-hero is a protagonist at odds with a society’s ethos, a once-burned or world-weary hero whose goal is survival (love of self), even if they are a bit self-destructive. 

So the anti-hero’s journey may be about a rekindling of their spirit toward another (an innocent, a lover, a child, a victim, a brother, a member of their inner circle, etc.), and they may attack, undermine, or burn down the world (or an institution or another symbol of the corrupt world) to protect someone specific or of a type, such as future innocents. 

However, an anti-hero must fail partially or wholly in these stories in order for the story to function as a critique of those sentimental stories in which heroes win. (When the anti-hero doesn’t fail, the storyteller has lost their nerve and chosen to tell a hero’s story.) But this failure of the anti-hero to save the day (to fail to synthesize oneself in a newly made world) simply restates the question. 

If an anti-hero fails to save the day, that tragedy reasserts the power of “the real world” in fiction and, therefore, takes us back to the beginning, to our reason for creating characters in fictional worlds in the first place, to the initial threshold of the human condition: the powerlessness of the individual in a system, even a fictional system or system of fiction itself. 

So the tragedy of the anti-hero proves the power of the system over the individual.

And so an anti-hero who fails in a fictional world does not remind us in any way of a more convincing reality; it simply restates a tragic conclusion that most people fear. Most people fear living without purpose and dying without meaning. 

This fear drives us to dream of those very worlds in which a human being transforms into a hero and overpowers the given world. 

The tragedy of the anti-hero is not an answer to the fantasy of the hero; the fantasy of the hero is an answer to the real world. 

In other words, we do not need an anti-hero story to be reminded of our powerlessness as human beings: individual, weak, solitary, mortal. We are reminded of that every day of our lives. 

Instead, we need a hero story to be reminded of the transformative power of our dreams. And we are reminded of our dreams, oh, so very rarely. 

We do not need an anti-hero, for the anti-hero brings us the old news of the world. 

We need heroes, for heroes bring us the desperately needed news of ourselves.

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So that’s what I wrote before I calmed down a bit and decided that when people say “anti-hero,” they don’t mean a character who is the opposite of the hero. They just mean a hero who’s not a goody two-shoes. They mean an anti-heroic hero, a main character who appears to lack typical heroic qualities but who still acts, in the story, as the main character. And that makes more sense to me.

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PHOTO: Me riding a motorcycle just like Marlon Brando