Duplicate Trope: The Ishmael

Let's compare the two.

Supporting Protagonist: When the story is narrated by a character not central to the plot.

The Ishmael: When the author creates a boring character to narrate the story of another character. Also a Character Named Trope.

They seem almost exactly the same. I think they should be merged. Opinions?

Making a Supporting Protagonist less interesting may have a value of a trope. But I don't think Ishmael is a very good trope namer.

Many who haven't read the book have heard of Moby Dick or Captian Ahab, but not Ishmael.

Maybe it should be renamed something like Bland Supporting Protagnist? It sounds kind of complainy but sounds more concise than Delibrately Bland Supporting Protagnastist.

Maybe Less Intersting Narrator?

The Supporting Protagonist is a point of view character, often a 3rd person limited POV.

The Ishmael is always the narrator.

edited 20th Mar '12 11:12:05 AM by Catbert

Hey, that's funny, I was about to start a thread on the same topic.

Yes, I do think these are the same trope. I don't see how it makes any difference for this trope whether the work uses first-person or third-person writing.

Also, The Ishmael is a bad name for a trope, first because Moby Dick is the ur-example of a book that teachers gush over but students don't actually read, and second because it fails the One Mario Limit big time: among other things, it is the biblical firstborn of Abraham, a Christian singer from the UK, and four different fictional characters from Fanny And Alexander, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, Goblins In The Castle, and Star Trek.

That was my impression too.

They're different tropes. The Ishmael is about a character who is there to be the narrator. Supporting Protagonist is about a character who is there to be the protagonist. What they have in common is that both are not the most important characters in the story.

EDIT: Oh, and BTW, Spark 9, you're misusing the One Mario Limit. One Mario Limit doesn't apply universally; there are other characters named Mario, just not in video games. Likewise, there are other characters named Ishmael, but in terms of tropes about narrators and POV, there's only one notable Ishmael.

edited 20th Mar '12 1:04:13 PM by Treblain

I see it as:

The Ishmael - A character who is not the protagonist, who exists to narrate the events that happen to the protagonist.

Supporting Protagonist - The protagonist is a character you would normally expect to be a secondary character - someone else in the story is The Hero or The Chosen One.

I think confusion between the two happens when you run into debates over who's the protagonist.

edited 20th Mar '12 2:31:26 PM by ccoa

Supporting Protagonist's description misuses "protagonist"; the protagonist is the person the story is about, not necessarily the POV character, but Supporting Protagonist uses "protagonist" to mean POV Character. Incidentally, we really need a trope for POV Character.

We do need a POV Character trope.

Threw it in YKTTW.

We just went 'round and 'round with this one recently. It's not misusing "protagonist". It's short for "supporting character protagonist", and only applies to genres where the convention is to have a particular "main" character as the protagonist. You can't have a Supporting Protagonist in slice-of-life fiction, because there's no expected convention about who the protagonist is in such fiction. You can have a supporting protagonist in detective fiction (for example), because we expect the Great Detective to be the protagonist (but not necessarily the narrator).

The Story of How My Boss Slayed the Dragon would be The Ishmael. The Story of How I Helped My Boss Slay the Dragon would be Supporting Protagonist.

The description was tweaked quite a bit to try to get this across. It's possible it still needs work if people are still getting confused.

I feel that would work better as a soft split: there's quite a lot of overlap if you help your boss (just a little bit) with that dragon.

@Xtifr and Treblain

Looking at it more closely, I'd say you are right. The examples need some cleanup though, and rename might be in order.

@Spark 9, You can't combine these because one of them is a form of narrative mode, and the other is about who the protagonist is. They are very different things.

Also, doing some research on the topic of Ishmael and narration:

The proper term for what we are trying to describe in The Ishmael is First Person Peripheral Narrator.

See here: http://www.cod.edu/people/faculty/fitchf/readlit/pov1.htm#firstperson

• When we have a character in the story also telling the story, we need to determine if the character is a central one or a peripheral one. Usually this is obvious and has to do with the relationship of the narrator to the events (plot). Obviously, the narrator in "A Cask of Amontillado" is also a major character, in fact, the protagonist. But is that the case in "Sonny's Blues"? In this case, while he is certainly a central character, I think we might agree that Sonny is the protagonist. Most of the time the shortness of the short story does not allow for the First person narration to involve a character who is very distant from the action. We might look at "A Rose for Emily" in terms of the first person narration and ask how close is the narrator to the events of the plot. Most would say the narrator is peripheral.

And here: http://traci-killen.suite101.com/point-of-view-a207608

• First person peripheral allows the writer to tell the story in first person, but uses a secondary character to relay the action. The reader experiences the story from this character's perspective as she tells the reader what she witness or what other characters tell her. With this approach, we only learn the motivation of the protagonists as interpreted by a secondary player.

And here: http://www.writingclasses.com/WritersResources/AskTheWriterDetail.php?ID=172

• While most first person narratives are told from the perspective of the main character, this isn’t your only choice. In “first person peripheral” the narrator is another character in the story, one who witnesses the main character’s story and conveys it to the reader. The peripheral narrator may be a part of the action but he is not the focus.

http://www.shmoop.com/moby-dick/narrator-point-of-view.html

• This leaves us with a few questions. First, when Ishmael is the first person narrator, is he a central or a peripheral narrator? This is related to the question of who the protagonist of the novel is – Ishmael or Ahab. If you think of the novel as Ishmael’s own story, then clearly he’s the central narrator; if you think of him as simply an observer of the larger story of Ahab’s quest, then he’s a peripheral narrator... We think of Ishmael as the First Person Central Narrator for the beginning of the book, while he tells his own story of deciding to go whaling and meeting Queequeg, and as the First Person Peripheral Narrator for most of the rest of the novel, when the narrative is more focused on Ahab.

edited 20th Mar '12 7:05:49 PM by Catbert

The last discussion on Supporting Protagonist was lengthy and confusing (in large part because the old description conflated The Hero with Protagonist). Re-opening this can of worms without reviewing What Went Before is probably not a good idea.

I see no reason to make any changes to Supporting Protagonist.

I do think we need to check The Ishmael for misuse, and at a minimum add the proper term for the trope it describes to the description and as a redirect. If widespread misuse is demonstrated, a rename could be in order.

BTW, could someone fix the tag so that it actually points to a real article?

edited 20th Mar '12 7:30:19 PM by Catbert

There is a button at the top of the thread to edit the tag. I changed it to point to The Ishmael.

Clocking due to lack of activity.

Crowner nailed to thread.

The crowner is misleading. There is no overlap between Supporting Protagonist and The Ishmael. The Ishmael is a narrator who is not the protaganist. The Supporting Protagonist is a protaganist. The two are mutually exclusive.

edited 20th Apr '12 9:32:29 AM by Catbert

As I understand it, several people in this thread disagree with your statement, and there was debate earlier in this thread about what exactly the word "protagonist" means.

edited 20th Apr '12 9:35:49 AM by Spark9

If there is overlap, the examples should be enough to prove it. Is there overlap?

No one directly addressed the arguments I made here and provided conflicting evidence. At any rate, if it is a matter of debate as to whether or not there can be overlap, the crowner should not state one side of the story as an established fact, and therefore the current crowner should be tossed as being biased.

The Ishmael describes an established literary phenomena called first person peripheral narrator.

First person peripheral allows the writer to tell the story in first person, but uses a secondary character to relay the action. The reader experiences the story from this character's perspective as she tells the reader what she witness or what other characters tell her. With this approach, we only learn the motivation of the protagonists as interpreted by a secondary player.

Read more at Suite101: Point of View: Narrators, Perspective, and Objectivity | Suite101.com http://traci-killen.suite101.com/point-of-view-a207608#ixzz1sbEjVFl2

If there is overlap in the examples, it is because of misuse. The solution is to fix the misuse, not perpetuate it.

edited 20th Apr '12 9:45:18 AM by Catbert

I've unhooked the crowner, given the controversy.

Let's figure out what the crowner options should be (and how they should be worded), and then we can try again.

edited 20th Apr '12 12:00:31 PM by ccoa

If I might make a suggestion, the problem is treating The Ishmael as a character archetype rather than a narrative mode.

Rename it to First-Person Peripheral Narrator and adjust the description to something a litle more informative in nature. However, keep the seperation from Supporting Protagonist, while removing the mention of Point of View of from Supporting Protagonist, which is confusing and misleading.

BTW, another article on the topic:

http://www.writeandpublishyourbook.com/archived-articles/archived/the-four-firsts%11point-of-view/

Supporting Protagonist is about having a protaganist other than the person that would be the norm for the type of story. It has nothing to do with who tells the story. Protaganist and narrator are not the same thing at all.

edited 20th Apr '12 10:04:19 AM by Catbert

I can live with that definition.