Antagonist

The antagonist is a personage who opposes the main hero (protagonist), embodies contrary forces, and impels the unfolding of the conflict. The term comes from ancient Greek theater (the antagonist as the 'rival' of the protagonist). The antagonist may be an individual (a villain, rival, enemy), a group of people, social circumstances, forces of nature, fate, and sometimes an inner principle in the hero's own soul (internal conflict). The opposition of protagonist and antagonist is the driver of the plot; it reveals characters and the ideational content of the work. The antagonist is not always 'negative' in the moral sense: what matters is their function as the resistance that makes conflict possible. A classic antagonist is Iago in Shakespeare's tragedy 'Othello.' In Ukrainian literature, the function of antagonists is performed by the serf-owning oppressors in the prose of Marko Vovchok and Taras Shevchenko and by social injustice in the novel of Panas Myrny.