Anti-Heroes in Literature

Traditional heroes bear certain positive qualities. They have strength, either moral, physical or both. They have a desire to do "good" or to act in self-sacrifice. And they desire wisdom.

Anti-heroes are the corruption of these qualities. The anti-hero is selfish and thinks himself already wise. If he wants to do "good", the "good" is ambiguous and self-serving. The anti-hero stands against the natural order and against the notion of society. Without exception he will be a figure removed from the community by his own will.

Three of the greatest examples of the anti-hero in literature are Captain Ahab from Melville's Moby Dick, Kurtz from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Sutpen from Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!

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Each of these characters holds a rank of importance. Each has been ordained to lead men, yet stands as a force of chaos set directly against god. These anti-hero figures balk at the natural order and push past it to create their own cosmos, discovering their own destruction in the process instead.

No one can exist in a vacuum, nor can man be sustained beyond the structures of morality and meaning. Ahab, Kurtz, and Sutpen each demonstrate this principle.

They seek to supplant the head of the natural order, the god or gods of their world; to set themselves up as arbiter of meaning and truth and even fate (Ahab), and each is struck down, surprised at his failure.

Not only do these literary figures stand against the natural order, they stand in direct opposition to the traditional notion of heroism.

Mr. Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Kurtz is an anti-hero, perhaps the quintessential anti-hero, because he has no real ties to other humans. His ambition then is to rule a world that he has left behind.

The leader of a failed and failing expedition into the jungles of Africa in search of the morally ambiguous prize of ivory, Kurtz hurls himself completely outside the scope of human relationships. The people who know him really can be said only to have known him, in the past tense, as he becomes a memory and a ghost and a shadow consumed by his abstractions, his ambition and his intimacy with the savagery of a life beyond morality.

He doesn't save anyone. He can't even save himself.

Kurtz is swallowed up by the forces of order and chaos which he dares to challenge.

Captian Ahab from Herman Melville's Moby Dick

Captain Ahab surpasses Kurtz in his selfishness. Ahab only falls short of the Kurtz for the title of "most anti" anti-hero when we consider the scope of each man's ambition.

Symbolically, perhaps, Captain Ahab and Colonel Sutpen take up the same universal challenge to the natural order that Kurtz does. However, among the three it is only Kurtz who risks the statement that this is what he intends. It is only Kurtz who rides to the very brink of chaos and peers into the teeming, chattering globe of it, and he even attempts to put words to it, a task which ends his life and leads him to his final words, "The horror. The horror."

Captain Ahab is the least intellectual of these figures, though he does stand as perhaps the most learned and brilliant character in Moby Dick.

Ahab is the original monomaniac, consumed by a single idea - to destroy the tool of god, the white whale. This one thought describes his pursuit, his character and his rebellion. To achieve it he will drag an entire ship's crew to the arena of challenge where, like Jacob wrestling with god in a midnight wilderness, Ahab will attempt to wrest mastery from the hands of god.

Where the traditional hero would challenge mortality in order to save life and discover wisdom, Ahab seeks only death and pursues the most profound folly of all - and, in so doing, dies having achieved no illumination save for the knowledge that he was doomed from the beginning to fail and fail utterly.

Colonel Sutpen from William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!

The first section of Absalom! Absalom! reads like a direct response to Heart of Darkness. In this novel the tale is, however, reversed. The anti-hero who would be the god of his own world emerges from chaos and darkness into light. Sutpen arrives in a small town and connives to purchase a huge swath of land, one hundred acres - Sutpen's Hundred - and establishes himself on the edge of the town and on the edge of social acceptability

Into the order of society he brings the devilry of his supreme ambition. Like Ahab, Sutpen has an idea that guides him. His vision is as banal as it is radical. It is, in a way, foundationally American.

Sutpen wants to remake himself.

The effort of renewal would not be doomed if it weren't for the absolute break from history which Sutpen set as the first tenet of his estate. He wanted the past to leave him alone. He wanted to be only in the moment. Rather, he wanted his future to bleed backward into his present and then into his past.

He desired the impossible. He desired to be his own creator.

If wealth alone would have satisfied, the Sutpen would have been neither hero not anti-hero. Simply, he would have been a business man.

But he wanted wealth and a family and respect, so he had to reach his hand into the town to pluck out a wife. Reaching for a family and for respect, Sutpen over-stepped. Because he asked for too much, Sutpen wrought the destruction of the estate he imagined and the destruction of the family that was to be its cornerstone.

Other literary figures appeal to brought into the discussion on anti-heroes. Jay Gatsby in his delusions, his realities; his wealth and his poverty would seem a likely candidate. He is too complex to situate in this discussion. One can argue for a positive heroism in Gatsby that cannot be claimed for Ahab or Kurtz or Sutpen.

Don Quixote is another famous non-hero. But he is a comic hero, not an over-lord who would challenge the natural order. He is a dreamer and a fool, but no dynamo. His last words, far from being "the horror, the horror" would be something more like "pass the wine, will you?"