I agree.
It’s certainly bait-and-switch, especially in the early books, where he clearly hates Harry and is generally assumed to be sympathetic to Voldemort, but what finally becomes clear is, during the time period of the seven books, he was a double-agent, working with Dumbledore to stop Voldemort and the Death-Eaters…as well as working to save Harry, even though Harry reminds him of the man to whom he lost Lily.
I would have picked Superman as hero, too. For anti-hero, I nominate Odysseus, and for villain, Shakespeare’s Richard III.
~Max
No he’s not. He’s murdering two guys he doesn’t know because someone is paying him to do it. If Unforgiven wasn’t so incredibly well written then he would follow the predictable Hollywood character arc of starting out as a hired killer but end up caring about bringing justice for the oppressed (and probably end up having to save the oppressed women from the vengeful townsfolk). But that never happens he just wants the money, and is willing to kill for it (then he wants to get revenge for his friend, but ultimately it’s really his fault his friend died, as he recruited him in a murder for hire plot)
He’s not an unsympathetic protagonist but he is in no way a hero (or antihero). Unforgiven does that moral ambiguity so so well
I don’t know that he has “wrong reasons,” but I do think it’s clear (in the Doyle stories) that he does what he does for the intellectual challenge and because it’s how he earns his living and because he genuinely wants to help people.
I’m inclined to think (in general, and not just in reference to Holmes) that those first two reasons alone neither make someone a hero nor disqualify them from being one.
Yeah I think the “high functioning autistic” model of Holmes where he only cares about the intellectual challenge and not about the people involved, is a modern invention for recent TV and movie representations. It’s been a long time since I read the books but IIRC he’s clearly being heroic and wanting good to triumph, as well as wanting to solve the puzzle (there is debate about whether Doyle was portraying an Autistic character long before the term was invented, obviously)
I agree with PL that the categories in the OP are somewhat limiting and literature has numerous examples of characters straddling the lines of all three. That said, there is also value to examining the archetypes. Miller brought up something I hadn’t considered which is the notion that because a story is told from the protagonist’s perspective, that automatically makes him a hero. While I would definitely agree that this alone tends to make the audience or reader much more sympathetic to the character’s viewpoint, I wouldn’t say it automatically casts them in that role. The protagonist doesn’t have to be the hero of the story (but will concede it’s the case the large majority of times). And there can be more heroes in a story than just the protagonist. Maybe it would be more correct to say there can be multiple heroic characters. Just like the antagonist is often cast as the villain, but there could be multiple villains too.
By the time of the first book, he has already redeemed himself. Harry, et al, thought he was a villain, but Dumbledore was clear the entire time that he wasn’t. Even in the first book, when Professor Quirrell was trying to throw Harry off of his broom, Snape was there trying to counteract those spells.
Pirates of the Caribbean offers, I think, a reasonably good set of models:
Will Turner: poor but noble of character, respectfully loves Elizabeth but will not break from social mores to say so until a crisis spurs him to display the bravery, tenacity, elan and constancy that are the mark of the true hero.
Jack Sparrow: vainglorious, a drunkard, treacherous, conniving, pursues only his self-interest and openly leches after Elizabeth - but just when it looks like he is sacrificing Will for his own ends, reveals that he is in fact maneuvering not just to get his revenge on Barbarossa but also to set Will and Elizabeth up for a happy ever after.
Barbarossa: while not without reason for what he is doing (i.e. lifting a terrible curse) has no qualms whatsoever about theft, kidnap, murder, pillage, treachery etc and rather than even pretending to treat these tactics as an unfortunate means to a necessary end, clearly revels in them for their own sake.
“I’d beat you in a fair fight”
“Well that’s a poor incentive for me to fight fair”.
It’s been a long time since I read the books too, but when I did as a youngster I loved them and devoured every Holmes story I could find. So, not that I’m claiming to be an expert on the Holmes character, but I think that Doyle did capture the essence of what was basically an autistic or at least non-neurotypical person, long before the term or the understanding of the condition existed:
So I don’t think the later ‘Homes as autistic’ persona was entirely a later Hollywood invention. I think one thing that was invented by Hollywood that became kind of an enduring mythos (but seems to have been corrected in more recent Holmes / Watson depictions) was the notion that Watson was kind of a dumb, bumbling boob. The ‘Gilligan’ to Holmes’ ‘Professor’, if you will. I remember at a previous job talking to a coworker about literature, and he made a joke about Watson not being the sharpest tool in the drawer, or something similar. And I said, in the books he’s not dumb at all-- he’s a ‘normie’. He’s a doctor, after all, which even in the 1800s must have required a fair amount of intelligence. Also, in the fiction of the Holmes stories, Watson was the one writing them, serving as Holmes’ documentarian. He was no dim bulb.
The reward money that Munny refuses to take in the end , and tells the Kid to give his share to Morgan Freeman’s children and have the Kid buy himself some glasses?
As Munny is leaving, he threatens to come back and kill every man in town if the women are harmed once he’s gone. Sounds like “he saved them from the vengeful townsfolk” to me.
I would say Dexter Morgan and Hannibal Lecter are archetypal examples of antiheroes; you know they’re bad people who you wouldn’t want anywhere near you, but you still root for them. Partially because they’re highly engaging and intelligent characters, but mostly because the authors have supplied them with villains who are even worse than they are.
More crucially, they don’t really change or become better people over the course of their stories; if they did, they would just be following the heroic arc of redemption.
I agree on Dexter Morgan (main character, good results, bad methods), but I think Hannibal Lecter is a straight up villain, with Clarisse being the hero in that story. Maybe in some of the other novels, but in Silence of the Lambs, he’s just a villain (IMO).
It’s been a while since I read those books, but I do remember they came to focus more and more on Hannibal as the protagonist. (seriously don’t click this if you have any plans to finish the series in the future)And in the end, he successfully seduces Clarice into becoming his cannibalistic sidekick.
Ironically I was just having second thoughts about Dexter, who I guess you could classify as an extreme version of a flawed hero (flawed because of his compulsion to kill, heroic because of his ability to channel that compulsion toward appropriate victims). Certainly he has a basic moral sense that Lecter completely lacks.
Dexter is like the Punisher, really.
I remember reading somewhere that Thomas Harris was not happy with the movie depictions of his work for whatever reason, so he wrote his final Lecter novel, ‘Hannibal’, in which, as you mention, he successfully seduces Clarice into becoming his cannibalistic sidekick, as a big ‘FU’ to Hollywood. “Let them try to make a movie out of this novel!”.
Which they did, wisely backing off on the more extreme, far-fetched ideas in the novel, but they did go pretty far in polishing up Lector’s reputation, practically making him a killer cannibal folk hero. In SoTL he was much more indiscriminate in his killing and liver-munching (I doubt the census-taker deserved that fate). By the time of the Hannibal movie he only killed and ate people he referred to as ‘free-range rude’.
Dexter is, to me, a classic antihero, who does good things for bad reasons. He stops bad guys and protects good guys, but he does it because he’s a psychopath who enjoys killing.
At least, that’s how he starts. After a certain point, his actions become more and more reckless and self-serving, and lots of innocent people start dying because of his actions or inaction. By the end he’s pretty indistinguishable from a villain.
Which has nothing to do with seeking justice and everything to with feeling rightly guilty about the fact he convinced his friend to join a murder plot that got him tortured to death. Nothing heroic about that, tragic yes, but not heroic. In fact my take is he does not expect to survive killing Little Bill.
As an afterthought, as he’s leaving, he realizes the townsfolk might be be a tad pissed at them for hiring an assassin who killed the sheriff and half the townsfolk, so he makes an empty threat (which in the cold light of day everyone will realize is an empty threat). He’s making a small token gesture as an afterthought to maybe save them from his actions. Completely unheroic.
I mentioned upthread that I’m currently doing a rewatch of Dexter, and I’ve been trying to decide whether he’s an antihero or just flat-out villain. I think the difference between the Punisher and Dexter is that the Punisher comes from a comic book universe in which things are more clear-cut; black and white. Yes, he’s a vigilante, but he kills bad guys, so he’s basically good. He’s Batman, if Batman killed people (which I think he did in the 30s when his character was first introduced).
But Dexter exists in a world with a bit more nuance. We have due process and rule of law for a reason. Vigilantism is against the law because people taking the law into their own hands leads to unintended consequences. The show Dexter, as Alessan says, demonstrates these unintended consequences, and how they accumulate and hurt the innocent and guilty alike, as the show goes on. I think I’d call Dexter a ‘sympathetic villain’.