Unit 4 · Topic 4.2

4.2 Protagonists, antagonists and clashing values

The protagonist is the main character; the antagonist is whatever opposes them, which might be another person, a whole society, nature or the protagonist's own inner struggle. Often the two stand for clashing values, and a foil character sharpens those values by contrast.

Key terms

protagonist
antagonist
foil
conflict
values

Protagonist and antagonist

The protagonist is the central character, the one whose goals and struggles drive the story. "Protagonist" doesn't mean hero; protagonists can be selfish, foolish or cruel.

The antagonist is the force that opposes the protagonist. It doesn't have to be a villain, or even a person:

Antagonist	Example
Another character	A rival, a parent, a bully, a spouse
A collective	A town, a family, a social class, a set of customs
Nature	A storm, an illness, the cold, the sea
The protagonist's inner conflict	Their own fear, pride, guilt or doubt

Opposing values

The most interesting conflicts aren't just "this person wants X and that person wants to stop them." They're clashes between ways of seeing the world. A protagonist might value kindness while the antagonist values social order, or one might value freedom while the other values security. When you analyze, name the values each side represents.

This also helps you avoid treating the antagonist as simply wrong. Often the antagonist has a real point, and the work's meaning comes from the tension between two partly right positions.

Foils

A foil is a character whose differences highlight another character's traits. A foil doesn't have to oppose the protagonist; often they're a friend or sibling. Put a cautious character next to a reckless one, and both traits stand out more clearly.

When you spot a foil, ask: what trait does the contrast bring out, and why does the work want you to see it?

Conflict between characters

Characters clash when their value systems collide. Arguments, betrayals and misunderstandings often come down to two characters who want different things or define the same thing (love, duty, success) differently. Reading the values behind a conflict lets you explain it instead of just describing it.

Questions to ask about any conflict between characters

What does each character want in this scene?
What does each one believe is right, normal or important?
Where do those beliefs come from: family, class, religion, experience?
Does the work seem to side with one character, or does it show both as partly right?

Worked examples

Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.

Example 1
A mother and daughter with clashing values
In Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party" (in The Garden Party and Other Stories, 1922), the wealthy Sheridan family is preparing a party when they learn that a poor working man who lived nearby has been killed in an accident. The daughter Laura wants to call off the party. Her sister Jose refuses, and then her mother: "'You are being very absurd, Laura,' she said coldly. 'People like that don't expect sacrifices from us. And it's not very sympathetic to spoil everybody's enjoyment as you're doing now.'" What values clash in this exchange, and how does the mother work as an antagonist?
Show the solutionHide the solution
1. Step 1: Identify the protagonist: Laura, whose feelings the story follows.
2. Step 2: Identify the opposing force. Mrs. Sheridan, backed by Jose, stands for the family's class and its habits.
3. Step 3: Look at the mother's words. "People like that" sorts the dead man's family into a separate group. She calls Laura's compassion "absurd" and then, strangely, says it's Laura who isn't "sympathetic."
4. Step 4: Name the values: Laura values human feeling across class lines; her mother values the family's comfort and social order.
Answer: Model paragraph: In this exchange Mrs. Sheridan becomes the antagonist to Laura's growing sense of compassion, and their conflict is a clash between human feeling and class comfort. The phrase "People like that" quietly divides the world into the Sheridans and everyone below them, as if grief across that line simply doesn't count. Mrs. Sheridan then turns the moral language upside down: Laura, who wants to respect a death, is "absurd," while spoiling "everybody's enjoyment" is called unsympathetic. Her calm, "cold" tone makes the class barrier sound like common sense. The antagonist here isn't a villain but a whole way of seeing, voiced by someone Laura loves, which is exactly why it is so hard for Laura to resist.

Common mistakes

Assuming the antagonist must be a villain or even a person. Society, nature or the protagonist's own fear can fill the role.
Using "foil" to mean any opponent. A foil highlights another character's traits by contrast.
Describing a conflict without naming the values on each side.

On the exam

Questions may ask what a contrast between two characters "emphasizes." Look for the trait the comparison brings into focus.
In the literary argument essay, naming the values on both sides of a conflict and explaining which one the work favors (or whether it refuses to choose) gives you a strong thesis.

Connected topics

Videos

"What is a Foil?": A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers
OSU School of Writing, Literature and FilmWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Lit Terms - Protagonist, Antagonist, Antihero, Foil
Brianna HodgesWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
What is a Foil? by Shmoop
ShmoopWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
An anti-hero of one's own - Tim Adams
TED-EdWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Who is the Antagonist? by Shmoop
ShmoopWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Check yourself

4 questions on 4.2 Protagonists, antagonists and clashing values. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.

“Jose, come here.” Laura caught hold of her sister’s sleeve and dragged her through the kitchen to the other side of the green baize door. There she paused and leaned against it. “Jose!” she said, horrified, “however are we going to stop everything?”

“Stop everything, Laura!” cried Jose in astonishment. “What do you mean?”

“Stop the garden-party, of course.” Why did Jose pretend?

But Jose was still more amazed. “Stop the garden-party? My dear Laura, don’t be so absurd. Of course we can’t do anything of the kind. Nobody expects us to. Don’t be so extravagant.”

“But we can’t possibly have a garden-party with a man dead just outside the front gate.”

That really was extravagant, for the little cottages were in a lane to themselves at the very bottom of a steep rise that led up to the house. A broad road ran between. True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans’ chimneys. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed. When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went.

“And just think of what the band would sound like to that poor woman,” said Laura.

“Oh, Laura!” Jose began to be seriously annoyed. “If you’re going to stop a band playing every time some one has an accident, you’ll lead a very strenuous life. I’m every bit as sorry about it as you. I feel just as sympathetic.” Her eyes hardened. She looked at her sister just as she used to when they were little and fighting together. “You won’t bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental,” she said softly.

“Drunk! Who said he was drunk?” Laura turned furiously on Jose. She said, just as they had used to say on those occasions, “I’m going straight up to tell mother.”

“Do, dear,” cooed Jose.

“Mother, can I come into your room?” Laura turned the big glass door-knob.

“Of course, child. Why, what’s the matter? What’s given you such a colour?” And Mrs. Sheridan turned round from her dressing-table. She was trying on a new hat.

“Mother, a man’s been killed,” began Laura.

“Not in the garden?” interrupted her mother.

“No, no!”

“Oh, what a fright you gave me!” Mrs. Sheridan sighed with relief, and took off the big hat and held it on her knees.

“But listen, mother,” said Laura. Breathless, half-choking, she told the dreadful story. “Of course, we can’t have our party, can we?” she pleaded. “The band and everybody arriving. They’d hear us, mother; they’re nearly neighbours!”

To Laura’s astonishment her mother behaved just like Jose; it was harder to bear because she seemed amused. She refused to take Laura seriously.

“But, my dear child, use your common sense. It’s only by accident we’ve heard of it. If some one had died there normally—and I can’t understand how they keep alive in those poky little holes—we should still be having our party, shouldn’t we?”

Laura had to say “yes” to that, but she felt it was all wrong. She sat down on her mother’s sofa and pinched the cushion frill.

“Mother, isn’t it terribly heartless of us?” she asked.

“Darling!” Mrs. Sheridan got up and came over to her, carrying the hat. Before Laura could stop her she had popped it on. “My child!” said her mother, “the hat is yours. It’s made for you. It’s much too young for me. I have never seen you look such a picture. Look at yourself!” And she held up her hand-mirror.

“But, mother,” Laura began again. She couldn’t look at herself; she turned aside.

Katherine Mansfield, “The Garden Party” (1922), from The Garden Party, and Other Stories (1922)

Question 1 of 4

Jose functions in the passage chiefly as

Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father. Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word:

“He is in Melbourne now.”

She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her. Of course she had to work hard, both in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss Gavan would be glad. She had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening.

“Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting?”

“Look lively, Miss Hill, please.”

She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.

But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married—she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl; but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages—seven shillings—and Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. He said she used to squander the money, that she had no head, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad of a Saturday night. In the end he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying Sunday’s dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do her marketing, holding her black leather purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through the crowds and returning home late under her load of provisions. She had hard work to keep the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to her charge went to school regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work—a hard life—but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.

James Joyce, “Eveline,” from Dubliners (1914)

Question 2 of 4

The passage suggests that the main forces pressing on Eveline include

Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o’clock. There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was due to the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man. He was used to the lack of sun. It had been days since he had seen the sun, and he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful orb, due south, would just peep above the sky-line and dip immediately from view.

But all this—the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all—made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a new-comer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.

As he turned to go on, he spat speculatively. There was a sharp, explosive crackle that startled him. He spat again. And again, in the air, before it could fall to the snow, the spittle crackled. He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle had crackled in the air. Undoubtedly it was colder than fifty below—how much colder he did not know. But the temperature did not matter. He was bound for the old claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek, where the boys were already. They had come over across the divide from the Indian Creek country, while he had come the roundabout way to take a look at the possibilities of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon. He would be in to camp by six o’clock; a bit after dark, it was true, but the boys would be there, a fire would be going, and a hot supper would be ready. As for lunch, he pressed his hand against the protruding bundle under his jacket. It was also under his shirt, wrapped up in a handkerchief and lying against the naked skin. It was the only way to keep the biscuits from freezing. He smiled agreeably to himself as he thought of those biscuits, each cut open and sopped in bacon grease, and each enclosing a generous slice of fried bacon.

At the man’s heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolf-dog, grey-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for travelling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy-five below zero. Since the freezing-point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man’s brain. But the brute had its instinct. It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that subdued it and made it slink along at the man’s heels, and that made it question eagerly every unwonted movement of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire. The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air.

Jack London, “To Build a Fire” (1908), from Lost Face (1910)

Question 3 of 4

The passage suggests that the man's chief antagonist is

Question 4 of 4

In paragraph 4, the dog's instinct, which “told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment,” mainly serves to

0 of 4 answered