Protagonist Quotes

“The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.("Introduction")”

“What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?”

“the glory of the protagonist is always paid for by a lot of secondary characters”

“And here, of course, we come to the one occupation of a female protagonist in literature, the one thing she can do, and by God she does it and does it and does it, over and over and over again.She is the protagonist of a Love Story.”

“Sometimes you’re the protagonist and someone else is the hero.”

“From there, a more difficult period began. Even the villains, the world's worst people, the one percent, what have you, imagine themselves to be the heroes of their own stories, and I saw myself this way. I, too, could be a hero or protagonist, and not some mere bystander in the greater drama of someone else's life. It was awkward to see a murderer as a hero, so I had to constantly remind myself of how Auggie's stepfather had been selfish and evil.”

“Don't just write a strong female protagonist. Be one.”

“Putting a piece of you in your protagonist adds depth and merges the worlds of fiction and reality.”

“The nature of the universe probably depends heavily on who is the actual protagonist. Lately I've been suspecting it's one of my cats.”