I think
Lal went straight to the nub of the matter:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Lalwendė
Very few of the characters are presented as either 'good' or 'bad'. Yes, a character may be on the side of 'good' or 'bad', but few are wholly perfect or entirely evil. What I find interesting is that Tolkien is not didactic about how we 'read' a character; he presents us with what they do and how their behaviour impacts on other characters, but he does not tell us what to think. ...it's the mark of a good writer to make his or her characters believable.
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Personally, few things irritate me more than characters that aren't true to life. (Not that I'm for modernistic realism, by which I mean [to paraphrase Agatha Christie] unpleasant people doing unpleasant things and not even enjoying them very much. I'm talking about characters at the moment, not stories.) And not that I don't enjoy judicious satire and exaggeration; try Dickens. It's just that Tolkien comes very close to creating
people as opposed to mere
characters.
And that's what makes the whole idea of an "unorthodox hero" possible. As
Lal pointed out even the "good" characters have flaws, and even one flaw makes perfection impossible. In real life you don't find people who are perfect. You can invent plenty of classifications with varying degrees of good and bad, but in the end even the "best" people are "best" in comparison only. Stories comes about as all kinds of people end up on different sides. We can easily recognize which is "good" and which is "bad," but it's all too easy to extend the definition to include everyone on each side. Those unorthodox heroes are largely on the "good" side, but they've got problems. It surely is difficult to classify people.
I just had a largely unrelated thought. We're discussing unorthodox heroes; are there any anti-heroes? I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm no good at thinking up examples. If there really aren't any - why not?