Morality in Literature (or: Why I'm Raving About Villain Protagonists)

 by Dawn Sands

Heroes and villains are not black and white. This sounds relatively obvious: no character is one hundred percent perfect; everyone makes mistakes and wrong decisions. Often, writers give their characters a hamartia, a fatal flaw, which triggers everything that goes badly for them and leads to their eventual downfall. At the same time, rounded, realistic villains have some redeeming qualities preventing them from being one hundred percent evil.

So, it’s pretty clear that heroes and villains are not black and white. But what about when there are no heroes and villains at all? What about when characters don’t fit within those parameters; what if there are no obviously villainous characters at all, yet evil is clearly afoot? Often, the villain is not a person at all, but an abstract concept. In Romeo and Juliet, you can argue that the villain is the blood feud between the two families - after all, it results ultimately in both the protagonists’ downfall, and it works strongly against the characters’ best interests throughout the play. Is every character a villain, therefore, all sharing collective responsibility? None of the characters have particularly evil intentions, but combined, their hatred towards each other is ultimately the root of all the pain and suffering any of the characters endure. Similarly, society can be viewed as the villain in Les Miserables - Javert is the antagonist, for certain, but is he just a hero with a hamartia: his stubbornness and inability to divert from his original perceived worldview?

Another setup which deviates from the traditional hero/villain dichotomy is the villain narrator, my absolute favourite thing in the world (bonus points if they start off as morally good people, then gradually experience corruption and end up utterly depraved). It’s a shame they aren’t more common - unfortunately they’re extremely difficult to write well (I have experience), and therefore there aren’t many around to analyse. Villain narrators fascinate me endlessly, because they completely subvert natural expectations of heroes and villains. You witness everything they do through their own lens; they perceive their acts as good and therefore they justify it. They lead you down your trap, and allow you to empathise with them and side with them right until they do something truly heinous, and you are drawn out of your reverie and forced to confront the brutal truth: this person who you have been led to love, with whom you held mutual trust, has done something irredeemable. And you just sat there and supported them as their plan unfolded, certain that what they were doing was for the best - because that’s what they told you.

Often, these villain narrators even admit they’re villains, some right from the beginning. Richard III, possibly the most famous villain protagonist in literature, tells you right at the beginning of the play that he is “determined to prove a villain”. Lady Macbeth, who isn’t the protagonist but is telling you this part of the story from her point of view, cries out to “fill me from the crown to the toe topfull of direst cruelty”. Oliver Marks, the narrator of If We Were Villains (more on that masterpiece later) spends the whole book in conflict with himself over whether or not he can be considered a villain. Salieri spends Amadeus trying to justify his murder of Mozart, before finally cracking in his old age. 

Moreover, these villain narrators are usually likeable. Ok, maybe not Lady Macbeth, but she isn’t a protagonist. It makes sense; if a well-rounded villain has redeeming features, then obviously a story told from their point of view will highlight these qualities and ignore their evil ones. Alternatively, they could just be so manipulative that they manage to convince you that their actions are justified. I love Richard III because of how close to Richard you become. Immediately, right from that opening ‘now is the winter of our discontent’ speech, he draws you in, justifying his future actions as soon as you meet him, so that you side with him. What does he essentially say in that speech? I’m angry because I’m ugly and bad at fighting, and my brother’s sleeping with lots of women right now, so I’m going to kill a bunch of people. It’s evil, but because it’s the first thing we hear, and it’s relayed to us in a way that generates sympathy, we empathise with him.

Villainous narrators like this really play with the idea of morality and, if written properly, cause you to question yourself. If we have the capacity to empathise with such characters as these, are we, too, more villainous than we see ourselves to be? After all, everyone believes themselves to be the hero of our own story, even if we know that our actions may be perceived as evil from the outside (Richard III, for example). Of course, I’m not talking about obvious evil characters like Voldemort, but what about the more subtle villains? If the story was told through their voice, who would you be siding with? What path might they all too successfully lead you down?

M.L. Rio’s If We Were Villains (an obscure choice, I know, but one that contemplates this so well) illustrates this concept perfectly. Structured like a Shakespearean tragedy, it allows you to see everything from the perspective of the villains, but all the way through the book, the main character constantly questions whether what they do even qualifies as villainy. Spoiler alert, because I kind of have to in order to illustrate my point - in IWWV, the main cast find their friend dying, and collectively decide to leave him to die rather than saving him. All through the book, the main character, Oliver, questions whether or not that qualifies as murder, and whether their reasoning for leaving the character to die really was as just as they perceived at the time. Early on in the book, the characters discuss Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

“But they’re not villains, are they?” Wren asked. “Cassius maybe, but Brutus does what he does for the greater good of Rome.”

At the end of the book, Rio seemingly ties it up with a quote from King Lear:

“...as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by heavenly predominance…”

By the end of the book, you’re left thinking - are they villains at all? Of course we’ve been led to believe, by watching the events as they unfold through the protagonist’s eyes, that they are in the right, that they did what they did “for the greater good of Rome”, as such - but at the same time, it cannot be ignored that they have done awful things. As the King Lear quote illustrates, it was completely in the characters’ control whether or not they saved their fellow student. No supernatural forces manipulated them into stranding him; no predetermined fate. At the end of the day - at the end of this character’s entire life - all it came down to was whether six people were willing to give a disturbed young man a second chance in life.

The If We Were Villains cast are likeable people, too (if extremely pretentious, but then who wouldn’t want to live their entire lives quoting Shakespeare?) - it isn’t as if their moral compass is so awry that they would naturally justify murder.

In that case, can we simply not divide people into heroes and villains at all? Is that too large a gap; impossible to truly distinguish between the two? In If We Were Villains, though the central theme is villainy, maybe there are no villains in it at all. Maybe they are all villains. If that is the case, then we empathised with those villains. Does that, then, make us just as bad as they are?

Probably not. None of us are ever going to end up committing murder (or at least, I hope not). Concepts and characters like this are frequently exaggerated in literature, especially in books like IWWV, or a Shakespeare play. (By the way, I promise I did try very hard to come up with examples that have nothing to do with Shakespeare. I’m aware this article is very Shakespeare-heavy, but there really are very few books with villain protagonists. I also promise I do read other books. On occasion.)

Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to read a book, or watch a film, and slowly realise that the narrator is not who you think they are. If you realise early on that their integrity is compromised, then congratulations, you’ve passed the morality test. But if it takes you until the end, what then?

Therefore, in conclusion, heroes and villains are not black and white. We know this; it’s a concept that sort of has to be explored in every book and every movie ever for it to be multidimensional. Some books, like Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows, are often defined by their morally grey main characters. But it is these books that completely break down the barriers between heroes and villains, that manage to justify the characters’ heinous acts and make you complicit in their crimes, that make morality so intriguing to me when viewed through a literary lens.