antihero

Madeleine L’Engle on the antihero:

Children don’t like antiheroes.  Neither do I.  I don’t think many people do, despite the proliferation of novels in the past few decades with antiheroes for protagonists.  I think we all want to be able to identify with a major character in a book – to live, suffer, dream, and grow through vicarious experience.  I need to be able to admire the protagonist despite his faults and so be given a glimpse of my own potential.  There have been a few young-adult novels written recently with antiheroes; from all reports they are not the books that are read and reread. We don’t want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us.  We don’t want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination. (Walking on Water 132-33) 

Questions: Is L’Engle right about this?  How does the Snape phenomenon fit into this?  Would the Snape craze be as intense and widespread if Snape had been the protagonist (the one through whom the story was told in the third person, limited omniscient)?  How does what L’Engle says fit with the love of the gothic villain-hero?

I’m analyzing this a bit in my chapter on Snape, but I thought I’d turn it loose in the Pub’s patrons for a bit.

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