Confidant

The confidant (/ˈkɒnfɪdænt/ or /ˌkɒnfɪˈdɑːnt/; feminine: confidante, same pronunciation) is a character in a story whom a protagonist confides in and trusts. Confidants may be other principal characters, characters who command trust by virtue of their position such as doctors or other authority figures, or anonymous confidants with no separate role in the narrative.[1]

Not to be confused with confident.

Role

The confidant is a type of secondary character in the story, often a friend or authority figure,[1] whose role is to listen to the protagonist's secrets, examine their character, and advise them on their actions. Rather than simply acting as a passive listener for the protagonist's monologues, the confidant may themselves act to move the story forward, or serve to guide and represent the reactions of the audience.[2]

History

The presence of the confidant in Western literature may be traced back to Greek drama and the work of Euripides.[3] The characters of Agamemnon in Hecuba and Pylades in Orestes serve as confidants, acting as both counsellors for the protagonists and expositors of their character.[4] The role of the confidant assumed particular significance in 17th-century French drama, however, coming to prominence in the plays of Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille. In Racine and Corneille, the confidant became a more complex and partial character[5]—though the abbé d'Aubignac complained that Corneille's use of the confidant was "without grace".[6] Shakespeare scholar Francis Schoff argued that in Hamlet, Horatio serves "even more than the Racinian confidant [as] a mere reporter of events and auditor for the protagonist".[7]

Interpreters such as Georg Lukács have remarked that the role of the confidant has diminished in modern literature, pointing to "the significant absence of the confidant(e) in the isolated situations in which the protagonists of the new drama find themselves", and the eclipse of the relationship of trust that exists between a hero and a confidant by a characteristically modern sense of dislocation and absence.[8]

gollark: Just disassemble more Mercury.
gollark: (Nobody likes Mercury, and it's near the sun)
gollark: *Ideally* we would convert Mercury into solar panels with self-replicators of some sort, but you know.
gollark: If you wanted to actually deploy them as, you know, solar panels, you would need more space than that.
gollark: If it wasn't for horrible cost problems (apparently mostly due to regulatory badness) you could basically just get arbitrary amounts of power from nuclear.

References
  1. Lawton 1943, p. 19.
  2. Patrice 1998, pp. 74–75.
  3. Worth-Stylianou 1999, p. 2.
  4. Lawton 1943, p. 20.
  5. Lawton 1943, p. 25.
  6. Worth-Stylianou 1992, p. 229.
  7. Schoff 1956, p. 53.
  8. Kennedy 1983, p. 67.

Sources
  • Kennedy, Andrew K. (1983). Dramatic Dialogue: The Duologue of Personal Encounter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Lawton, H. W. (1943). "The Confidant in and before French Classical Tragedy". The Modern Language Review. 38 (1): 18–31. doi:10.2307/3717370. JSTOR 3717370.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Patrice, Pavis (1998). "Confidant". Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Scherer, Jacques (2014). La dramaturgie classique (2nd ed.). Paris: Armand Colin.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Schoff, Francis G. (1956). "Horatio: A Shakespearian Confidant". Shakespeare Quarterly. 7 (1): 53–57. doi:10.2307/2866115. JSTOR 2866115.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Worth-Stylianou, Valérie (1992). "La querelle du confident et la structure dramaturgique des premières pièces de Racine". Littératures Classiques (in French). 16: 229–46. doi:10.3406/licla.1992.947.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Worth-Stylianou, Valérie (1999). Confidential Strategies: The Evolving Role of the Confident in French Tragic Drama (1635-1677). Geneva: Librairie Droz.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
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