Definition
The principal character in a play or novel who exhibits qualities the opposite of those usually regarded as "heroic." The anti-hero may be cowardly, weak, inept, or simply unlucky. Here is the description of the anti-hero of E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News (1993):
. . . failure to speak clearly; failure to sit up straight; failure to get up in the morning; failure in attitude; failure in ambition and ability; indeed in everything. His own failure.
Although occasionally present in earlier literature, the anti-hero has proven to be a staple of modern literature, much of which is written, in Northrop Frye's phrase, in the "ironic mode." Frye describes the ironic mode as one in which "the characters exhibit a power of action inferior to the one assumed to be normal by the reader or audience."The modern prototype (he even uses the term anti-hero to describe himself) is the anonymous, first-person narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864). Locked in his room, the underground man records his rage and humiliation as he rails against the prevailing belief in human reason and scientific progress. His progeny have been many. As the critic Victor Brombert points out, "Nineteenth and twentieth century literature is . . . crowded with weak, ineffectual, pale, humiliated, self-doubting, inept, occasionally abject characters . . ." Notable recent examples include the narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the "judge–penitent," confessing his sins in Albert Camus's The Fall (1954).The anti-heroic strain also adapts itself well to comedy with its inherent impulse to debunk the pretensions to greatness that heroism implies. Here Shakespeare sets the tone in Falstaff's "catechism" on honor from Henry IV Part 1, where the old knight asserts that "honor" is a mere word that he'll have none of. In the 20th century, the anti-heroic comic figure finds two perfect proponents in Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik (trans. 1930) and in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961). Both Schweik and Yossarian, Heller's anti-hero, attack the heroic ideal at its heart, the field of military valor. Similarly, the weak, neurotic, bespectacled figure embodied by Woody Allen in his films always implies a critique of the pretentious, beautiful people with whom he associates.
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