Antihero: Someone who rejects conventional morality, suffers from indecision, lacks qualities, is weak, epitomizes human frailty. Looks a lot like me. Is dead.
I've been working on a short novel, more or less autobiographical, in which the fictional me is something of an antihero. Running Bernstein, my alter ego (half-Jewish, half-Native American like me, forged in the velvet caldron that is Princeton, like me) is a rake -- a flawed person who makes all sorts of bad choices, choices that seldom lead to self-realization or, well, goodness. He feels that he, as he really is, has no value, and so he becomes what he believes is a more efficacious kind of ethnic, only to find that he has lost the very thing he wants to preserve and protect: himself.
To be honest, Running Bernstein is fairly easy to write. Since I think of myself as a good person -- I believe in the truth, compassion, foreplay, songbirds, outdoor smoking and the sacredness of children -- creating an antihero was mostly a matter of imagining myself in a situation and then charting a reaction opposite to what I would do in "real life."
I like antiheroes. I admire the writers who make them too: who find in the sheer wrong-headedness of these characters something human and sublime. Until recently, antiheroes have been so popular, it is sometimes difficult to pin down what they are. Contrary to heroes of the older type, antiheroes often possess few "positive" qualities. They are not strong or decisive or true to others, much less themselves. Like Holden Caulfield, antiheroes spend a lot of time rejecting the morality of their times and have difficulty acting in any way that is virtuous. And yet, like Holden, they often fall prey to their own rejectionism and become that which they most loathe.
My favorite antihero is Charles Kinbote from Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire." Kinbote is so convinced the world is what he wants it to be that he can't see how uncomfortable he makes others, how often he misinterprets them. At one point, he mistakes a snide remark about halitosis for a snide remark about hallucinations -- showing in the mistake the very thing that is wrong with him, which he cannot see.
