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Non Person Antagonist
I am currently having a major rethink of my novel and have realised that the person who I thought was the antagonist is not actually the antagonist but is in fact the conduit for something that is the antagonist and was wondering on peoples thoughts/examples of non human antagonists and any pitfalls
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13 Replies
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I have this in my book and have been struggling with revealing its nature. I have tried to not make it stereotypical and to give it a backstory just as if it was a human. I am not sure I have succeeded yet and am still reviewing it, but I think one pitfall is if the alien has nothing in its motivation or story that can add a dimension of understanding as to why it is doing what it is doing and elicit some element of sympathy from the reader. Even in Alien – the films – the alien was trying to propagate its race and protect its eggs – a thing we can all relate to. I don’t know if this helps or is just a ramble!
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Hi Barbara – no ramble at all and you nailed it with the example – mine is a bit more abstract than that but you are quite correct – the motivation is the key – “just because” doesnt work
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Hi Eric (?), the idea of a ‘non person’ protagonist is an intriguing one. Do you mean, as per Barbara’s comment, some sort of non-human being or force, which might well have motives or reasons or something non-sentient, like a mountain or a meteor? In the latter case we might anthropomorphise (had to spell check that) to the extent of attributing human like motives that don’t actually exist, which would be an interesting exercise.
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agreed JPK and Aliens is a good example – though trying to think of others – in The Martian the antagonist I think is the distance, Jaws, Perfect Storm
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The old man and the sea would be a good example. The antagonist switches from being the fish to the sharks to something within the old man himself in a very short piece of work.
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Many great war novels lack a human antagonist–and no one seems bothered by that. The enemy forces are really just obstacles to the hero’s quest–and may even be seen as victims themselves. The existential threat is provided by the scenario itself. Some authors attempt to anthropomorphize the war into a particular character, but we usually end up seeing that this antagonist is just trapped in his roll in the same way the hero is. One of them is not going home–and it isn’t either one’s fault. The people who started the war are not present on the battlefield, and usually survive the outcome.
In my work-in-progress, a five-part story of fighter-pilots in the First World War, I attempt to give a human shape to the conflict through the superstitions and nightmares of the protagonists. They believe (or try not to believe) in a Black Angel that chooses who will live, and who will die–and even offers some of them glory and renown in exchange for their mortal souls. It’s a seductive idea because it offers some semblance of order and destiny to the otherwise chaotic and random depredations of combat. I am hoping readers will think so too.
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Hi Vin – I am looking forward to reading your novel – as a total aside – there is a great book called “Flak” by an Australian comedian call Michael Veitch (the book is not funny btw) where he travelled around Australia interviewing people who had flown for the RAF during WWII – it is a truly moving, fascinating and insightful book about young men, in some cases almost boys, being thrust into what was often perceived as galmorous but was anything but, life and how the dealt with it – may be some great research just in terms of how they reacted to the stress – I know WWI was different in many respects as it was so very new but would highly recommend this in terms of research plus it is so very well written and he has a great ability to get people to open up
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Hi Eric,
First-up, I’m not claiming this from experiential knowledge, but the assimilation and distillation of countless external sources of writing advice…I would start by asking: what is an antagonist? The obvious answer is that it’s the protagonist’s opposition, the thing, whatever form that might take, which is working against the protagonist’s goals. But that raises the question of what is the protagonist, and what are the protagonist’s goals? Why are there even goals involved? This, of course, leads to the core question of what is story, and what is the one underlying universal plot of all story?
The answer is simple: all stories are extrusions of the concept that someone wants something to change. This may be that something is changing, and they want to stop it; that it has changed and they want to change it back; that they want to disrupt the status quo. or any of a million subspecies of those. The someone is our protagonist. The inevitability of the situation that they want to change is the core protagonist, whether that is the world-destroying asteroid, the handover of power, or the momentum surrounding the protagonist’s current situation.
Now, if we refocus from the abstract to the individual story, we have to look at another factor: antagonistic scale. This has two dimensions. One is the duration of the antagonism: is this antagonist operating on the scale of the entire tale, or only on the scale of a single scene? Even a single beat of interaction? The second dimension is scale, of which there are four general categories: man-versus-world, man-versus-others(general), man-versus-other(specific), and man-versus-self. In any (good) story, you want to be hitting as many of these as you can, and even overlapping them into the same scene/beat.
Some of these are, for want of a better description, the consequences of physics; they are the state of universal evolution which will have disastrous consequences (the asteroid, for example). Some are disembodied extensions of one or more people (per your scenario, with the enemy army representing the enemy’s leaders). Some are groups of people, or individuals. And some are the protagonist playing a duel role, where two needs are in conflict.
An example of this would be one of the stories I have queued up to write: on a grand scale, the core antagonist is a shipful of aliens. They, for their own reasons, want to change the earth’s atmosphere. This triggers a series of events, a race against time to solve problems before this world is unsurvivable. But the true conflict within the story, that area it will focus on, has to do with the primary character’s battle with his own priorities. The alien attack is a backdrop, albeit a world-destroying one. On one hand, he should be in his deep-sea lab, working on ways to undo the effect of the alien attack. But… Oh, but how can he leave his son in the care of an abusive boarding-school teacher? (The relationship with the son is a core thread.) His caring is his own true antagonist: two duties, both driven by the same loving of others, that are pitted against each other.
So, how does this address your underlying question? Simply that trying to have a single protagonist-antagonist axis within your story will make it quite flat. The best antagonists – the ones prose is best-suited to – are of the man-versus-self variety, especially where they arise from the impact of how to reconcile two or more other antagonised scenarios. Or, as Vin mentioned above, where the protagonist’s desires conflict with their beliefs.
The evolution of antagonism, consideration of it at an overarching, inciting level, and all the way down to individual beat antagonisms, will give you a much more engaging story. And, your higher-level antagonist is allowed to evolved during your story, especially if the tale results in the protagonist’s primary motives and desires evolving. Antagonists and protagonist-companions are allowed to trade places…
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Thanks Rick – this is an excellent response and certainly a great deal to think about. Maybe I am being a bit simplistic but as an example the internal conflict that the protagonist has I see as not being an antagonist in its true sense.
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In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the antagonist is the protagonist. This is my all-time favorite stroke of pure genius. I don’t think its implications have been sufficiently explored by other writers–the psychology study it invokes is an abyss. Badly drawn antagonists (in human form) are cartoons: what is interesting to me is to see how much the protagonist and antagonist are alike. That takes real skill.
Otherwise, just make the antagonist a horrible virus and you are good to go.
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Hi David – thanks for the comment – yes – Jekyll and Hyde is pure genius – but for me a truly good antagonist is someone or something that you understand and can relate to and though you may not agree with the motives undersand why they are doing what they do – I dont think a horrible virus really works and therein lies the crux of most bad B movies
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The best antagonists, I believe, are where they have traits within them that hint at redemption or at least paints them in shades of grey, if you have some sympathy for the antagonists position then it make it a much more interesting read and adds depth to the overall narrative.
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Datco – this is a really good point that is often missed completely – I believe a really good story is one where in the “final boss scene conflict” you are not quite sure if you should be rooting for the antagonist or protagonist
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