Word: protagonist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
LOVE AMONG THE CANNIBALS, by Wright Morris (253 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.50), carries built-in advertising. At one point, the protagonist rhapsodizes: "Old lecher with a love on every wind, and you young ones too, running in pimpled packs after the teen-age bitch with her perfumed heat, and you, too, pretty matron, under the hair dryer, this is your book...
Like Graham Greene, Irish Novelist Hanley dotes on the guilt on the candelabra. He has given his protagonist the usual "failed-priest face," the customary taste for booze, and the symbolical death -Brennan falls from the height of Gaudi's grotesque unfinished Barcelona Church of the Holy Family. It is all pretty thick stuff, but an angry, eloquent passion against the paralyzing Red ticks in Europe's soft underbelly redeems it from mere melodrama...
...fair protagonist is a callow youth who was raised in what is euphemistically called a "house of illfame." And apparently finding his mother in bed with another man when he was a child so destroyed his values and trust in the world that he finds it necessary to stab people for entertainment to kill an old woman who had been kind to him in childhood, and in what seems to be the central scene of the film, exposes a sweet and innocent girl whom he loves and who loves him, lying prostrate and expectant, to another man. After this follows...
...bookkeeper (Don Murray) is the protagonist in this Philistine's Progress. He lives with his pretty little working wife (Patricia Smith) in a small flat in a big Manhattan housing development. As the picture begins, the wife has just told him that she is going to have a baby. He is stunned. How will he ever be able to finish night school? And if he doesn't finish night school ... "I think you oughta go to this bachelor party tonight," says his wife after one look at the poor punk's face. "You oughta have a little...
...apparently as reasonable as ever, but he often seems bewildered and uncertain nowadays, a counterpuncher with nothing to counter. The "role wandering aimlessly in search of a hero," which he envisioned for himself and his country, is more and more becoming a role in a Greek tragedy, its protagonist hopelessly playing out his own doom. He still has the possibility of creating further disasters, but no soundly bottomed hope of raising up his people, for he has denied himself the trust of those who could help him fulfill his original dream. He can only call in the help of Communists...