Citizendia
Your Ad Here

The protagonist or main character is the central figure of a story. A novel (from Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new" "news" or "short story It is not necessarily clear what being this central figure exactly entails. The terms protagonist, main character and hero are variously (and rarely well) defined and depending on the source may denote different concepts.

Basically, the term protagonist is defined to be either always synonymous with the term main character, or it is defined as a different concept, in which case a single character still may (and usually will) serve the function of both the protagonist and main character, or the functions may be split.

In classical and later theater the protagonist is the character undergoing a dramatic change (peripeteia), both of his own character and external circumstances, with the plot either going from order to chaos (in a tragedy, with a reversal of fortune bringing about the downfall of the protagonist, usually an exceptional individual, as a result of a tragic flaw (hamartia) in his personality), or from chaos to order (in a comedy, with the protagonist going from misfortune to prosperity and from obscurity to prominence). Peripeteia ( Greek,) is a reversal of circumstances or turning point Hamartia ( Ancient Greek:) is a term developed by Aristotle in his work Poetics. Comedy (from the Greek κωμωδίαkomodia has a popular meaning (any discourse generally intended to amuse especially in Television, Film, and

Sometimes a story about an exceptional character being a driving force behind the plot, facing an opponent (the antagonist) and undergoing an important change like it is the case with the protagonist may be told from the perspective of a different character (who may, but will not necessarily also be the narrator). A narrator (or the extremely rarely used female equivalent narratress) is within any story (literary work movie play verbal account etc In such cases it may be helpful to define the character through whose perspective the plot is followed as the main character, the main character having here a separate function from the protagonist.

The principal opponent of the protagonist is a character known as the antagonist who represents or creates obstacles that the protagonist must overcome. As with protagonists, there may be more than one antagonist in a story. (Note that the term antagonist in this context is much more recent than the term protagonist, and rests on the same misconception as the use of protagonist to mean proponent. See below. )

Sometimes, a work will initially highlight a particular character, as though they were the protagonist, and then unexpectedly dispose of that character as a dramatic device. A literary technique or literary device is an identifiable Rule of thumb, convention or Structure that is employed in Literature Such a character is called a false protagonist. In fiction a false protagonist is a technique for making a scene more jarring or a character more memorable by fooling the audience's preconceptions regarding who the story is really about

When the work contains subplots, these may have different protagonists from the main plot. A subplot, sometimes referred to as a "B story" or a "C story" and so on is a secondary plot strand that is auxiliary to the main plot In some novels, protagonist may be impossible to pick out, because the plots do not permit clear identification of one as the main plot, as in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, depicting a variety of characters imprisoned and living in a gulag camp. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn ( Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын) (December 11 1918 – August 3 2008 was a Russian Novelist The First Circle ( В круге первом, V kruge pervom) is a novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn released in 1968

Contents

Usage

Protagonist or protagonists

In an ancient Greek drama, the protagonist was the leading actor and as such there could only be one protagonist in a play. "Ancient" redirects here For other uses see Ancient_(disambiguation. The term ancient Greece refers to the period of Greek history lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca Drama is the specific mode of Fiction represented in Performance. However the word has been used in the plural to mean 'important actors' or 'principal characters' since at least 1671 when John Dryden wrote "Tis charg'd upon me that I make debauch'd persons. John Dryden (– was an influential English poet Literary critic, Translator and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England . . my protagonists, or the chief persons of the drama" [1].

Protagonist as proponent

The use of 'protagonist' in place of 'proponent' has become common in the 20th century and may have been influenced by a misconception that the first syllable of the word represents the prefix pro- (i. The twentieth century of the Common Era began on A syllable ( Greek:) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds e. 'favoring') rather than proto-, meaning first (as opposed to deuter-, second, in deuteragonist, or tri-, third, in tritagonist). In Literature, the deuteragonist (from δευτεραγωνιστής deuteragonistes, second actor is the second most important character after the Protagonist In Literature, the tritagonist is the third most important character after the Protagonist and Deuteragonist. For example, usage such as "He was an early protagonist of nuclear power" can be replaced by 'advocate' or 'proponent' [2]. Nuclear power is any Nuclear technology designed to extract usable Energy from atomic nuclei via controlled Nuclear reactions

Protagonist in psychodrama

In psychodrama, the "protagonist" is the person (group member, patient or client) who decides to enact some significant aspect of his life, experiences or relationships on stage with the help of the psychodrama director and other group members, taking supplementary roles as auxiliary egos. Psychodrama is a form of human development which explores through dramatic action the problems issues concerns dreams and highest aspirations of people groups systems and organizations A psychodrama director is the leader of a Psychodrama session (usually a psychotherapist psychologist counsellor or other Mental health professional who by his/her


See also

An antagonist (from Greek ανταγωνιστής - antagonistes, "opponent competitor rival" is a character or

Dictionary

protagonist

-noun

  1. The main character in a literary work or drama.
  2. A leading person in a contest; a principal performer.
  3. An advocate or champion of a cause, or course of action.
© 2009 citizendia.org; parts available under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License, from http://en.wikipedia.org
Dapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic