Post 3 Response- Protagonist

Even though this may seem a bit of a 3rd grader lit term, I think there is something key to how authors use protagonists in novels. With Mersault, Janie and Offred, we as readers see that a story revolves around one person's life/ POV, or how a story changes in relation to one person. This is found a lot within literature and I personally believe causes problems with ego centrism in writing. As ego centrism is found within the western philosophy of individualism, this can limit writers from expanding their mindset because they feel they are stuck within this mind set that they have to write for audiences that will only like novels written from this viewpoint. This also limits how readers perceive books because much of the time we are not open to new kinds of stories. From when we are young, we are taught protagonist, antagonist, plot, rising action, climax, falling action, conflict, conflict resolution- this taught mindset in schools makes it so that it is harder for the western mind to break out of this mindset and to respond to stories that don't follow this pattern. The protagonist can be thought of as 'we are for this'- aka, usually within a story, the 'good' character is praised in the way the author writes about him/her/it, hence having the prefix 'pro' meaning 'in support of'. As the reader, we are suppose to sympathize or support the protagonist and detest the antagonist. Also, there is a bit of a paradox though with sympathizing with the character Mersault. As I understood the text, Mersault seems to be dealing with absurdism- aka the struggle between trying to find meaning in life and the inability to find any. The audience can sympathize with him as he is sentenced to be hanged, however he himself finds no meaning to his own life. Therefore our sympathy towards this character from Mersault's POV is probably meaningless. Crazy right?