Villains, Monsters and Antagonists

Figures whose narrative function is opposition rather than protagonism: the antagonist who obstructs or threatens the protagonist, and literature's monster figures, whose menace is bound up with the moral or social transgression the work is examining. Belongs here: a character whose defining role in the work is antagonistic, menacing or monstrous, whether human or not. Does not belong here: a protagonist who commits wrongdoing but remains the work's central sympathetic figure, tracked under Byronic Heroes and Antiheroes above.