The Anatomy of the Antagonist

Today I'm questioning what you know of antagonists. 

I’ve got a surprise for you: antagonists aren’t vaudevillian characters forced into all-black outfits including matching mask and cape. They don’t have to have skinny, curly moustaches, wear pointy-toed shoes, or have a maniacal laugh.  They don’t have to have bomb-making kits or stroke white, poufy cats while monologuing about their devious plan. They don’t have to have a Chevy if you have a Ford, and they don’t need to smoke their tires at the green light. And I’ve got news for you: they almost never wear “Hello: My Name Is” nametags that say they’re the bad guy, or do other things to openly declare their role.

How do you know? Because an antagonist is almost always defined by the viewpoint narrator. If your viewpoint narrator changes, your antagonist changes.

What? I thought a bad guy was the bad guy. How can there be a story without a bad guy?

The definition of an antagonist is only that person that stops the protagonist from getting what he/she wants. If there are two high school girls after one guy, one of the girls is the narrator and the other girl is the antagonist. They might both do not-so-nice things to each other to get to the guy, but that doesn’t make either of them the “bad guy” per se. The antagonist is only the person that is stopping the narrator from getting what she wants.

Nonfiction writers: afraid of hurting someone’s feelings? Don’t be. The truth is that there has to be conflict in the story for it to be interesting. You have to make someone the antagonist –and you can do that without villainizing him or her. This is another good reason to write objectively: you don’t have to tell the reader how he/she should feel about your antagonist, just what the antagonist did and let the reader make up his/her own mind. Your writing should be for you, not to defame the antagonist, no matter what he or she has done. If you aren’t telling the story that needs to be told because you’re afraid of what that antagonist might say or do, you’re allowing him/her to be the antagonist again, aren’t you? Remember, the only definition of an antagonist is someone who blocks the protagonist from getting what he or she wants.

Which characters make the best antagonists? Okay, so you should always assume that your reader is as smart as if not smarter than you, right? If that is true, they don’t want to be told that a 2-dimentional vaudevillian in black is your bad guy. Give us a bad guy that is charming, that a little part of us still respects –even if we don’t want to respect him/her. Christoph Waltz has an eye for these kind of characters. In Inglorious Basterds, he plays a Nazi that is at both times charming and evil (he is, after all, a Nazi officer…). He plays the same type of character in Water for Elephants: he’s inviting and hospitable. After all, no one would get sucked into his web if he wasn’t, right? In Django Unchained, he isn’t an antagonist because he’s helping the protagonist get what he wants, but he still does things that you may not ethically agree with. Which brings me back to the example about the high school girls: both the protagonist and the antagonist need to have good and bad qualities. No character is all-good and no character is all-bad.

Can the antagonist be abstract? Yep. Sometimes antagonists are things like self-doubt, fear, complacency, or change. Think about Hamlet, for instance. While, yes, Uncle Claudius was the murderer and while Hamlet wants to bring justice to his uncle, the uncle never actually does anything to stop Hamlet. What stops Hamlet is his own fear of inadequacy and his own complacency. When he’s overcome that is when the story has its climax.

I hope this helps, dear writer.