Essays on Protagonist

In both Night and Sarah’s Key the protagonists undergo similar transformations due to their perseverance through optimism, being stripped of their innocence, and guilt for their loved ones. Loss of hope Eliezer’s hope and optimism rooted in his faith of God are questioned when he...

Matters and issues of the mind have both intrigued and puzzled writers for about as long as people have been writing. Some such writers have explored the inner workings of the mind of the madman, finding this type of character to be the most effective...

In both Night and Sarah’s Key the protagonists undergo similar transformations due to them losing hope, being stripped of their innocence, and guilt for their loved ones. Perseverance Eliezer’s hope and optimism is eroded when facing the hardships he experiences at the camp. Eliezer states...

Jack London’s short story ‘To Build a Fire’ tells a tale of a man that perceives his self as perfect in every way. This stubborn individual decides to travel solo, with his dog through the treacherous and uninviting environment of the Yukon. The man clearly...

Jack London’s ‘To Build a Fire’ can really be seen as a job of art. It’s an excellent short story for anyone looking to read with subjects that anyone can relate to, such as survival and man versus nature. Everybody understands a dog is the...

Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian filmmaker, was best known for his 1970 masterpiece The Conformist, which was a huge inspiration to Francis Coppola when making The Godfather in 1972. The Conformist centers on the life of Marcello Clerici, a hitman working for the Organization for Vigilance...

In the novel, Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami, the protagonist Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old Japanese, runs away from home intending to escape his father’s curse, which is that he will sleep with his sister and mather, then kill his father. During the escape,...

The title of the story Rashōmon is the name of an entryway in Kyōto, the biggest gate of Kyōto, actually. In any case, Kyōto has fallen on harsh occasions, and our protagonist is a recently ownerless samurai who has looked for the gate’s safe house...

Are readers being too idealistic when they favor perfect heroes in stories over flawed ones? Authors August Wilson and Arthur Miller force readers to ponder the likeability of an imperfect protagonist through their characters. In Fences by August Wilson, the main character Troy is a...

In America there is a systematic structure that is portrayed by the White Male patriarchy that authorizes black males to transact the way they act, speak, think and live like men. Nonetheless, the actuality of race and the absence of racial diversity hinders a black...

In the story of “A Wrinkle in Time,” by Madeleine L’Engle, Meg Murray is a 13 year old child who has a lot of insecurities about her personality and her intelligence. Meg starts off as the “ugly duckling” of the family you could say. She...

Chay Yew, in “Porcelain” and “Wonderland,” examines various notions of “queer” through his characters, who desperately seek connections, and love, with the people around them. Their lives are marked by death, violence, and tragedy, which occurs not only because they are queer, but also because...

In “Shout,” Dagoberto Gilb focuses his story on the emotions and headspace of his protagonist, a manual laborer returning home from a hard day’s work. While he looks to escape the toil of his labor, this laborer realizes that his home life does not provide...

The search for identity that the protagonist, Grenouille, in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer occurs differently than others because his identity is driven by the beauty of the innocent scents which appeal to him. Grenouille is brought up with a gruesome environment, thus influencing...

Bildungsroman novels are identified by the grueling quest a protagonist undergoes in his search for place in society. The experiences the protagonist undergoes within this search contribute to their moral and psychological growth, building to one pinnacle point in their life, the long awaited identification...

The evolving workplace of 1920s America presented industries and businesses with an innovative new standard of operation: work smarter, not harder. These innovations included the popularization of the assembly line, the right for women to vote (and, thereafter, the quest for the right to equal...

Thrusting into the world of Tokyo in the 1960’s, Norwegian Wood is a novel by Haruki Murakami, which was published in 1987. At first seeming very foreign and obscure, Norwegian Wood proves that even over a span of nearly five decades, not much changes socially....

Balram Halwai is a protagonist in Aravind Adiga’s epistolary novel The White Tiger, in the sense that he is the primary driver of events in the story, and due to the fact that he faces great challenge and adversity, and overcomes the difficulties in his...