Antagonist examples: what an antagonist is, with 30 examples by type

An antagonist is the character, group or force that opposes the protagonist and stands between them and what they want. Some antagonists are villains, like Claudius in Hamlet, but many are not: a rival with good reasons, a storm, a whole society or the protagonist's own fear can do the job. An antagonist is defined by opposition, not by evil, which is why a dutiful clergyman can be one and a monster who never crosses the hero's path can't.

The word goes back to the Greek antagonistēs, “competitor, opponent, rival,” and has been in English since the 1590s. The 30 examples below fall into five types, and each type ends with one passage set out goal against goal, so a villain, a rival and a storm can be compared directly.

Antagonist vs villain

Most villains are antagonists, but a villain isn't always the main antagonist. A thriller's hired killer may work for a bigger opponent, and in a survival story the villain can be a minor threat beside the weather. A villain can even be the protagonist, a case the protagonist examples cover. Iago, the classic villain-antagonist, is taken apart in how to write a villain, so he isn't repeated here.

Villains: antagonists who mean harm

The most familiar type: a mind on the other side that wants the protagonist to fail, or doesn't care if they're destroyed.

1. Claudius, Shakespeare's Hamlet (c. 1600). He murdered his brother, married the widow and took the crown, and he fights Hamlet by watching him: spies, borrowed schoolfriends, a rigged duel.
2. Bill Sikes, Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838). A housebreaker who drags Oliver along on a burglary and murders Nancy when he learns she has tried to help the boy.
3. Mr. Murdstone, Dickens's David Copperfield (1850). The stepfather who calls his cruelty firmness. He beats David, who bites his hand, and sends the boy to work in a London warehouse at ten.
4. General Zaroff, Richard Connell's “The Most Dangerous Game” (1924). A cultivated hunter on a Caribbean island who has grown bored with animals and now hunts shipwrecked sailors. The hero, a hunter himself, becomes the prey.
5. Rupert of Hentzau, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894). The handsome, insolent young noble who serves the usurping Duke Michael and keeps the hero, Rudolf Rassendyll, off balance with cheek and nerve. He is the one villain who rides away at the end.
6. Lord Voldemort, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (1997–2007). A modern dark double, tied to the hero by a prophecy, a scar and a childhood as an orphan.

Goal against goal. Hamlet wants his father's murder avenged. Claudius wants to keep the crown, the queen and the secret of how he got them.

Claudius knows what he did and why he won't undo it: he wants to keep the crown, the ambition and the queen. That self-knowledge makes him a stronger antagonist, not a softer one, because he can't be shamed into confessing. Hamlet has to beat him. The scene also hands Hamlet his worst decision. He finds Claudius kneeling, decides not to kill a man at prayer, and leaves, and only then does Claudius admit, alone, that the prayer didn't work.

Rivals and opponents with good reasons

These antagonists aren't villains. They want something that collides with what the protagonist wants, and they often believe they're helping.

7. St. John Rivers, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). Jane's cousin, a missionary bound for India, who wants her as a wife for the work. More below.
8. Inspector Javert, Hugo's Les Misérables (1862). He hunts Jean Valjean for most of the novel because the law is the law. When Valjean spares his life, his certainty can't survive the debt.
9. Lucy Steele, Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811). Elinor's rival, who confides, as a friend, that she has been secretly engaged to Edward for four years, and turns the confidence into a weapon.
10. Mr. Darcy, for half the book, Pride and Prejudice (1813). He snubs Elizabeth, separates Jane from Bingley and proposes as if granting a favor. In romance, the love interest often starts as the antagonist.
11. Edgar Linton, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847). The gentle, wealthy neighbor Catherine marries instead of Heathcliff, and the man who finally bars Heathcliff from his house.
12. Hector, Homer's Iliad. The Trojan prince defending his city against Achilles, an antagonist the poem honors: it ends with his funeral.

Goal against goal. Jane wants to be loved as herself rather than used. St. John wants a wife for the mission, and believes God wants it too.

St. John is brave and honest, he took Jane in when she was starving, and he believes the marriage would serve God. That is what makes him so hard to refuse, and why his proposal threatens what Jane has fought for since the first chapter. She offers to go to India “as your fellow-missionary, but not as your wife,” and he won't accept it. An antagonist with good reasons can test a protagonist's values harder than a villain, because there is no easy no.

Nature and forces with no motive

Storms, cold, plague and animals. A force with no motive can't be argued with or tricked, so the protagonist's choices carry the whole story.

13. The white whale, Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). An animal defending itself, which Captain Ahab turns into a personal enemy. More below.
14. The Red Death, Poe's “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842). A plague that Prince Prospero walls out of his abbey. It arrives at his masked ball anyway.
15. The flood, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860). The river that reunites Maggie Tulliver with her estranged brother, Tom, and then drowns them both.
16. The island, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). Weather, hunger and solitude for twenty-eight years. Crusoe's antagonist is the daily work of staying alive.
17. The typhoon, Joseph Conrad's Typhoon (1902). Captain MacWhirr refuses to steer around a storm he lacks the imagination to fear, and the novella is the storm.
18. The shark, Peter Benchley's Jaws (1974). A modern force of nature with a fin, and a resort town that would rather not hear about it.

Goal against goal. Ahab wants the whale dead. The whale wants nothing: it defends itself, and all the intention is Ahab's.

The whale has no malice. Ahab supplies it, and Starbuck, on the same deck, says so. That is how a mindless antagonist gets onto the page: through a character who reads intention into it, and usually another who refuses to. The argument between the two men is what turns a whaling voyage into a story about obsession. If your antagonist is a storm or a disease, decide who in the cast treats it as an enemy, and who treats it as weather.

Society as the antagonist

A community, a class, a law or a whole state whose rules the protagonist can't live by. It works best through agents: a magistrate, a mother-in-law, a dinner table.

19. Old New York, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920). A society that never raises its voice. More below.
20. The colleges of Christminster, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895). They will not admit a stonemason, however much Latin and Greek he teaches himself.
21. Creole society, Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899). The duties of wife and mother that Edna Pontellier, on Grand Isle and in New Orleans, stops being able to perform.
22. The rest cure, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). The narrator's husband, a physician, forbids her to work, and the medicine of her day speaks through him.
23. The One State, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (first published in English in 1924). A city of glass where citizens are numbers and the narrator, D-503, is a loyal engineer until he isn't.
24. The Party, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The modern model: a state that wants belief, not just obedience, with a face in Big Brother and an agent in O'Brien.

Goal against goal. Newland wants Ellen. Old New York wants no scandal and his marriage to May intact, and it never has to say so.

At the farewell dinner for Ellen Olenska, Newland Archer realizes that the whole table believes he and Ellen are lovers, and has arranged her departure without a word said to him. Wharton goes on to describe a class of people who feared scandal more than illness and thought nothing worse than a scene. That is society as an antagonist at its most effective: no single villain, dozens of agents, and a protagonist who loses without ever being openly attacked.

The self as the antagonist

The protagonist's own flaw, fear or desire, which no one else can defeat for them. It is usually layered under an outer antagonist that brings it into the open. The label is useful only when you can name both halves: the goal, and the part of the character that works against it in a scene. “Her insecurity” is a mood. “She wants the promotion, and every time she is asked to present her own work, she hands it to someone else” is an antagonist.

25. Jim's jump, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900). One moment of cowardice and a life spent trying to answer for it. More below.
26. Michael Henchard's temper, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). Drunk at a country fair, he sells his wife and baby daughter to a sailor for five guineas. Years later he is the town's mayor, and his own rashness takes it all apart again.
27. Emma Bovary's dreams, Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857). The romances she read as a convent girl set expectations that no husband, lover or town could meet, and her debts follow.
28. Faustus's ambition, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (c. 1592). He sells his soul for twenty-four years of power, while a Good Angel keeps telling him it isn't too late to repent.
29. Ivan Ilyich's denial, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). A judge who can't admit, even while dying, that the correct life he built was a wrong one.
30. Tyler Durden, Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996). A modern self-antagonist who turns out to be the narrator's other half.

Goal against goal. Jim wants to prove he is the man he believes he is. What opposes him is the man who jumped, and the fear that he would do it again.

Jim, first mate of the Patna, jumped from a ship full of pilgrims that he was sure was sinking. It didn't sink. The outer story is an official inquiry and a ruined career, but the antagonist is the gap between the man Jim believes he is and the man who jumped, and Conrad puts it in the grammar: Jim can't say “I had jumped” without adding “It seems.” A self-antagonist needs moments like this, where the flaw shows in what a character does or says, not just in what the narrator tells us.

How to choose an antagonist

Start from what your protagonist wants and what they most need to learn. Then work through five questions.

1. What tests the flaw? Choose opposition that presses where the protagonist is weakest. St. John presses on Jane's wish to be useful. Lucy Steele presses on Elinor's composure.
2. What's the inner layer? Put an outer antagonist over an inner one, so that beating the villain or the storm requires beating the fear as well. The guides to types of conflict and internal vs external conflict show how the layers push on each other.
3. Who gives the force a face? A storm needs an Ahab or a MacWhirr. A society needs a magistrate, a hostess, a family.
4. What does the genre promise? Thrillers promise a mind on the other side. Survival stories promise a force. Literary novels often turn on society or the self, and romances on a rival or the love interest.
5. Could the antagonist win? If the protagonist could win in chapter 2, the middle has nothing to do. For 50 premises built around motive, see the villain ideas.

Common antagonist mistakes

• A wall, not a will. An antagonist with no goal of their own only blocks. Give them something they want that the protagonist's success would cost them.
• The vanishing middle. The opposition sets things in motion and returns for the climax. Remind the reader what it can do at the pinch points, even if only through a result or a message.
• Society in the abstract. “The system” can't hold a conversation. Put its rules in a person who enforces them.
• All inner, no outer. A fear with nothing to press on it becomes three hundred pages of brooding. Give the flaw a situation that forces choices.
• Beaten by luck. If the antagonist loses to a coincidence, the protagonist hasn't won anything. Let the decisive blow come from a choice.

An antagonist who is strong in the outline can thin out in the draft. Keep an outline, such as the novel outline template, with one row per chapter and columns for what the protagonist wants in that chapter, who or what opposes them, and which layer it is, outer or inner. Ten rows in a row with an empty antagonist column are the sagging middle.

With that outline attached, ask the Strokes Assistant to name the antagonist in a chapter and what the antagonist wants there. If it can't find an answer on the page, a reader may not either.