Word: protagonist
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...character who is constantly humiliated and questioned in a unforgiving world for her unhesitating love. She is pure and childlike, resisting the constraints of the social order, even to the point of self-negation. Von Trier thus is not cold and mechanical to his protagonist (although he could be criticized for his idealization of femininity), but rather he seems to have the utmost compassion...
...Their love story underscores the Rocky-esque atmosphere of the film, imparting it with that coveted action-film and chick flick dynamic. But unlike Gladiator or Braveheart, the protagonist, refreshingly, does not have a Y chromosome. She owns her unmistakable femininity and her bulging biceps equally, discovering what it means to be a modern woman, and, more importantly, what it means to be herself...
...observed it in his treacherous hometown: "There was never a golden age. There will never be a golden age and it is sheer romance to think we can ever be other than what we are now." Now, 33 years later, Sanford pops up again as the protagonist of another Vidal novel, set in the same place and roughly the same time, and readers familiar with the author's career-long penchant for ironies will in no way be surprised to hear that the new book is called The Golden...
...worthy people are destined for defeat, what does that make of the winners? This question hums throughout Vidal's historical series, particularly as it applies to the biggest winners, U.S. Presidents. Burr casts both Jefferson and George Washington in a harsh light. Lincoln portrays its protagonist as almost diabolically unknowable in his use of power; Empire makes merry with the boisterously ambitious Theodore Roosevelt. Vidal's fiction strives mightily to transform the faces on the Mount Rushmore monument into rubble and scree...
Imagine a narrator-hero who tells his story without noticing how little of it he truly understands. Or rather, don't imagine such a creature, because Kazuo Ishiguro has already done so brilliantly in the figure of Stevens, the self-deluding butler-protagonist of The Remains of the Day (1989). And it seems at first as if the author is up to the same sort of trick in his new novel, When We Were Orphans (Knopf; 336 pages; $25). Christopher Banks, who has become a prominent London detective during the 1930s, displays all of Stevens' careful, fussy punctiliousness in recounting...