NOTE—the original title was What situations allow for passive protagonists in genre fiction? I've changed to title to allow the thread to grow. Feel free to post about the original subject if you want to. ******* I specify genre fiction because that's where the protagonist is supposed to generally be active and drive the story. It seems that isn't as important in literary fiction. I've thought of a few situations where I think it can be OK to have a passive protagonist in genre fiction. I'd like to hear other suggestions or just your thoughts on it. Here's what I've got so far: Romance with a feminine (passive) protag who gets swept off her (or his) feet by a charismatic lover Certain kinds of comedies Like say a Woody Allen movie where he's an observer and maybe victim of all kinds of zany stuff Stories like Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz. I think for several reasons—they're both dreams, they both have a strange land with crazy secondary characters, and I think a more passive protag stands in for the viewer/reader as a proxy, a sane person whose eyes we see this insanity through. Alice is very spunky though, she refuses to let herself be pushed around by these sadistic freaks. I also think the passivity of the protag makes her feel more vulnerable to the strong forces surrounding her. I also think the dreams both reflect a time when the dreamer needs to be shown something that's wrong in their attitude. Maybe they're held helpless, immobile before the onslaught of the unconscious forces showing her the error of her ways (Dorothy takes her farm life and the people around her for granted, believes the good life is only found somewhere over the rainbow—not sure about Alice).
Oh, horror movies, of course. But then, those are probably reactive rather than strictly passive. Also movies where the protag is being chased or hunted by a mob or whatever. Yeah, but again that's reactive. The same might be true of the examples I listed above too. I found a decent little (very short) article about it: Screenwriting : Why you should consider passive protagonists The good stuff takes place in the comments really, where they get into reactive characters. Interesting that either active or passive characters can be reactive.
Well, if everything I listed above is really reactive characters (I'm not entirely sure yet), then maybe you only have really passive characters in literary fiction? Or are those generally reactive too? Sorry, I'm making this confusing now (actually I'm not doing that, it got confusing all by itself).
I don't understand how you can have a character without him reacting to events. Even if he is passive in some ways, he still must react, or else he is a vegetable. How can a protagonist be completely passive? It doesn't seem possible. Pardon me if this is pre-established terminology that I happen to be unfamiliar with.
No, you might be right. That's what I was realizing when I said "then maybe you only have really passive characters in literary fiction? Or are those generally reactive too?" So often you hear about passive protagonists, usually that it's just a big no-no. I'm looking into it, but it's just complex enough of a topic (too many variables) that search engines can't really handle it. "Passive protagonist" is pretty standard terminology, but maybe it's just wrong. In which case I suppose I should start looking into various kinds of reactive protagonists. Which won't be easy, I don't think many people use that term. Maybe all I can do ultimately is think through a bunch of stories and movies where the protagonist isn't active and separate them out into different kinds of reactive protags.
@Xoic Would a teen/coming of age story like the film Almost Famous qualify? That one has a fairly passive main character, but it works because he interacts with much more active characters.
Yeah, it probably does. I've seen it, but I don't remember much about it. He does seem to be pretty reactive though. Yeah, I think that's a situation that does allow for it. Like the really crazy and sometimes sadistic dream characters in Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz. You need a less assertive character in the lead as a foil for them, or everybody will just be fighting all the time.
Aquinas said evil was the absence of good. And I'd question whether characters can be passive, substantially: I prefer to think of them as more active, less active, or (at worst) not active. And I would even qualify that further: characters in fiction aren't active like we are, because most things they can only do fictionally, which is to say they do them in the sense that they don't do them. But I believe there are two things that fictional characters do in the same way as us: which are to make choices and to speak. I wonder if Alice and Oz would pass muster as modern novels. Both are very short (26k and 40k), and the latter was panned by the critics until after it couldn't be reviewed in isolation from the film version. Alice and Oz both have some interest value pitched to adult readers, but both are in the form of children's stories - with the illustrations doing a lot of the work. If the protagonist makes no choices and also has no voice, I would question if they are a character - let alone the protagonist. Alice I think is railroaded through her story by Lewis Carroll: she chooses Eat Me or Drink Me, but this is only the illusion of choice - it's always whatever gets her into the next scene. But I think she does have a distinctive voice: one of keen, cutting insight couched in childish innocence. This gives her an inner world of being wise beyond her years. Dorothy though I think fails my test - and I'd suggest to think of her+lion+tinman+scarecrow as a single character split into four so as to provide children with a microcosmic study of the classical virtues, and adults with a macrocosmic allegory for the economy. It's neat, but I don't think it counts as a novel. I regret I've only seen a couple of late Woody Allen films that he didn't star in. But in film, characterization isn't ex nihilo like it is on the page. Even if the screenwriter and director don't like it, it happens naturally in the actor's person - sometimes the director shapes the actor, other times the actor shapes the story. The equivalent of a passive written character is a wooden actor. And we might watch some actors just for the looks on their face when things happen to them. re. Romance, I'd suggest stories that really do reduce to the passive woman being swept off her feet are badly-written, and that good romance novels either give the characters unique voices or give them interesting decisions to make. Very much romance uses head-versus-heart dilemmas, and these have as many possible permutations as there are human beings in the world to fall in love. Head-versus-heart never gets old.
Nice. I Like that. I do want to keep the idea of reactive though, as opposed to a character who acts on others and forces them to react. Agreed. And that does parallel the way most dreams work, we're stuck following a dream script we don't get to edit. Unless we achieve lucidity of course. But it works in dreams in a way it doesn't in stories, unless the author is doing something really clever I think. Agreed Well said and true. Screen presence can uplift a dead script, and lack of it can kill a decent one. I'm not very familiar with romance, aside from a few movies, but I do know 50 Shades was a huge hit, apparently the book before the movie. Before that there was 9 1/2 Weeks, another dominance/submission story. I suspect those go over well. But that doesn't make them well written. Interesting Also interesting. It's really what I would call conscious vs unconscious, seeing as emotions emerge from the unconscious. I've spotted many movies that use that dialectic in various guises.
I've seen Forest mentioned on several lists of passive protags. I guess it works because he connects up a bunch of important historical moments, but he's just an ordinary guy. And I guess it's another instance of a character interacting with powerful/important figures.
My first thought for "passive" genre protagonists are the dudes in harem manga. And there's a reason so many people hate harem manga.
What does award the title "protag" if not some sort of (re)activity? Just that the character happens to appear in each and every scene? I wouldn't call Forrest Gump passive. Well, he does not plan and he seems to attract strange coincidences, but in the end he did a lot. Maybe triggered by his surroundings but he rescued his comrades in Vietnam. He did run across the continent. One setting where I could imagine a purely passive protag is an (unaware) super-spreader of a decease. He can be Mr. (or Mrs.) Nobody and living an absolutely boring live while still driving the story (the unfolding of a pandemic and the fight against it e.g.). Although I have no actual example at hand. Still you risk that the audience picks some other character as their de-facto protag and the super-spreader degrades to a story device.
I'd say the factory girl Pippa in Robert Browning's story-poem "Pippa Passes" is a good example of a passive protagonist. She forwards the plot due to the kind of person she is and the effect she has on others around her, even though the only "action" she takes is to contemplate the people she encounters on her birthday walk around the town.
I'm not familiar with that one @Catrin Lewis , need to see if I can find it somewhere online. A poem might be more like literature, in that it doesn't necessitate an active protag to propel a forward-oriented story. I don't really remember it very well, but what about The Idiot by, is it Tolstoy? Possibly a passive or reactive protag. He's like The Fool on the Hill in the Beatles song, actually enlightened (IIRC) but seen as a hopeless idiot by the 'normal' people. I might be remembering it wrong though.
Yeah, sounds right: "A saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power, and sexual conquest than with the ideals of Christianity." Maybe I never actually read it though, I remembered it being a short story but it's actually a novel. Not really sure if he's passive or reactive though. But a situation like that would definitely allow for it. And I mean, it's Tolstoy, so probably closer to literary than genre. Literature doesn't require forward propulsion nearly as much as genre writing does.
I do not feel that Forrest Gump was at all passive. He reacted and interacted, but Forrest Gump himself did not change very much despite his radically changing circumstances. I think what is meant by 'passive' is that Forrest has no emotional or other type of traditional character arc. He is who is he is, almost completely Zen. He accepts the changes in his life, but he never changes.
The best (only?) example I can think of for passive main character is the deaf man in Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, where other characters can't communicate with him but paint their own thoughts/motives on him in the absence of his capacity to communicate otherwise. She does give us a glimpse into his interior, though, even if that is unavailable to most of the other actors in the book.
I don't remember it very well at all. To be considered an active protagonist he'd need to make decisions and take action that changes the course of the story, or at least his own arc in it I suppose. I seem to recall one among us mentioning "Making choices inconvenient to the author and to the character." From what little I can remember, it seems the choices Forrest makes might be little more than plot devices to conveniently move the story along to the next historical figure? Correct me if I'm wrong.
What propels his choices throughout the story are the three constants in his life; Forrest believes in and loves his momma, he believes in God, and he loves Jenny. He'll do whatever they tell him to. God and momma told him to accept everyone for who they are. Momma told him he's no different than anybody else. Jenny told him don't be brave, if you're in bad trouble just run away. "Run, Forrest, run!" This is 80% of what Forrest does. Running gets him into college. "He may be the stupidest son-of-a-bitch alive, but he sure is fast." Running away saves his life (Bubba and Lt. Dan told him to run) in Viet Nam and because of that he winds up saving others. He runs away from the pain when Jenny leaves and becomes a celebrity - again. He accepts Bubba for who he is, and sees no difference after Taylor loses his legs; "You're still Lieutenant Dan." Quite different from the book, the movie "Forrest Gump" is a quick tour of the US from the 50s to the 90s. The characters eternal acceptance allows quite a few contentious events to be presented without too much in the way of judgement or editorializing. I've seen the film many, many times. When I just beginning my audio post, sound design/editing career, it was one of several movies that had substantial information about how the sounds were created, so I was watching constantly and referring to notes. A very similar character is in "Being There" by Jerzy Kosinski. "After the death of his employer forces him out of the only home he's ever known, a simpleminded, sheltered gardener becomes an unlikely trusted advisor to a powerful tycoon and an insider in Washington politics." Very good book, very funny movie. One of Peter Sellers' best performances.
Forrest starts making choices in the first couple of pages - and only Winston Groom knows if they were inconvenient to him, but I suspect Forrest's choice to approach Jenny Curran, the girl he likes, would have been a pain to write. There's a balancing act between making Forrest look like a pervert and alienating the reader, or making it too artificial and tear-jerking, or making it unrealistic to the social attitudes of the time, or avoiding those traps by describing it in more detail than Forrest describes things. I doubt that part of the first chapter can have been a virtuoso performance. But I'd suggest Forrest is defined more by his voice, e.g.:- I think Forrest does change - by the end of the story we know that the thoughts he thinks underneath the words are sorrowful, and wise. He lives up to the truth he sets out in the opening passage. EDIT: in the film I -think- I remember Tom Hanks intonating Forrest's lines at the end slowly or hesitantly, representing him processing increased emotions. Or it might have been the music. Or it might be that Hollywood dumbed the character down.
Thanks for refreshing my memory. I've seen the movie but never read the book. From this synopsis ( @Alcove Audio ) it honestly sounds like he does what people told him to do and it sort of incidentally brings changes around him. Or maybe it's his choice to just keep running, when anyone else wold stop and do things in a more conventioanl way? Even that though seems like pre-programmed behavior that he does on auto-pilot. I want to lean toward his being mostly reactive? It most definitley sounds like he has what K M Weiland calls a flat character arc—he starts off already knowing the truth that others around him don't know, and he changes the world around him with that truth. That being: Or maybe it's not entirely flat: Though maybe that's just a sort of deepening of understanding on his part, rather than a real change? No, I suppose a deepening of understanding is itself a change. Well, whether it's a flat arc or a change arc is somewhat beside the main point of the thread. The real question is—does he make choices and take actions that change the course of the story? If not then he qualifies as a reactive protag (better term than passive). And if he's a reactive protag, what makes that work, or makes it "OK"? I'd say he fits into the mold of The Fool on the Hill or The Idiot, a wise man who doesn't need to take decisive action and so is seen as a fool by the ordinary (unwise) people around him (except of course for his 'disciples', who run with him). Spiritual/Religious wisdom is often about passive or receptive acceptance of things as they are, and that makes for characters who are far from active in the standard Narrative/Genre sense.
On choices+voices, 'a fool becomes wise' is the story of Forrest Gump. The (false) external world of the fiction is only there to host the choices that reveal character. It reverses the natural way of reading to try and resemble the logic the writer might have used. We read it that:- Forrest chooses to ask Jenny to the dance, and that's an inciting incident that causes his family to have to leave town. But it's perhaps composed as:- Forrest will start as a fool, to show this he will choose to do something sexually foolish, and that will require a town and a family and a dance and a female character. Forrest Gump fits any definition of a protagonist, but we don't necessarily need the overall story to have an 'agon' at all, so long as there is enough conflict to give the characters choices to make, and feelings to voice. I think the other characters in Forrest Gump are very faint - but in a story with strong characterization we might aspire to execute the agon entirely inside characters. @Also wrote a good post (https://www.writingforums.org/threads/verisimilitude-in-description.171772/#post-1951653) about critique crushing out our natural responses. And that's certainly happened in my case with Forrest Gump. I can't enjoy it now I've seen that the Forrest Gump character isn't written as someone with a learning difficulty, but as an everyman given a voice supposedly like that of someone with a learning difficulty - via the verbal trick shown in the book's first paragraph. This is really just the old potboiler from drama that the gods can make fools wise (and fear them in case we make them feel like doing the opposite). It's not remotely representative of people's real voices, or lived experiences - and the positive message that we can't make assumptions about people's potential I think we ought to find from other places than this film. At the time it came out and in its context I'm sure it has changed perceptions and been a force for good. Just not one I can find beautifully written. Going back to early drama's religious aspect, the emphasis probably wasn't on accepting the divine order, but on the audience recognizing sin or hubris within themselves and casting it out. And the prehistoric origins were something along the lines that once a year the whole tribe met and blamed everything they had done wrong on a goat - which led to goat-shaming becoming an art-form, with ever more elaborate and salacious misdemeanours being attributed to the poor creature. Authors remember: if the stories we tell at the goat-ritual are about what happened to the goat, the goat isn't morally responsible for our actions, and the tribe will drive us out after all.
