Byronic Heroes and Antiheroes

Protagonists defined by moral ambiguity rather than moral clarity: brooding, defiant, often self-destructive figures who reject conventional virtue, in the mold literary criticism names after Lord Byron's own heroic type, extended to the twentieth-century antihero who narrates from outside society's judgment altogether. Belongs here: a lead character whose sympathy with the reader survives, or even depends on, open moral compromise, alienation or rebellion. Does not belong here: a villain whose function is primarily to oppose the protagonist, tracked under Villains, Monsters and Antagonists below.