Word: antiheroism
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Alfie! by Bill Naughton. A bird is a girl in cockney argot, and Alfie is strictly out for the birds. In this unpretentious and consistently pleasant comedy, Alfie counts the workaday world well lost for lust. He is the modern, international antihero, the man who wants to be kind to everyone and responsible...
...Thackeray's antihero, christened Redmond Barry, was a soldier, Member of Parliament, traitor, spy, gambler, spendthrift and all-round cad. He hounded the rich Lady Honoria Lyndon into marriage, taking her name as well as her fortune. The luck of Barry Lyndon finally ran out in a London prison, where he died of delirium tremens...
...sympathy for Sir Grummore Grummurson, as he called Colonel Blimp's Arthurian ancestor. White did not lament the decline of empire so much as the withering of English virtues commended by 15th century Printer William Caxton: "Chyvalrye, curtoyse, humanyte, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love." In an age that celebrates the antihero, the neurotic, the schemer, Tim White argued that morality was something worth striving for. His conviction that justice rather than force must govern all human relationships seems even more relevant than in Arthur's days...
This pitfall has trapped J. P. Donleavy in adapting his novel The Ginger Man, although he has fashioned an arresting amoralist as his antihero. Sebastian Dangerfield (Patrick O'Neal), an American studying law in Dublin, is life-prone and dead beat. His head is more often in his cups than his books. He is one of Nature's seductive heels, and in the most brilliant scene in the play, he seduces a mid-thirtyish spinster whose tempestuous flesh mocks her primly parochial morality...
Burgess leads the reader skillfully through the cycle. His antihero, a nonentity named Foxe, halfheartedly shovels history at fifth formers in the first phase. During Interphase, he is a political prisoner and then a refugee, frantic to eat and not be eaten (cannibalism is part of the chaotic interregnum). In the third phase, Foxe enlists in an army whose sole function, it turns out, is to relieve the population pressure by annihilating another army-and itself...