The everyman is a stock character of fiction. An ordinary and humble character, [3] [4] the everyman is generally a protagonist whose benign conduct fosters the audience's identification with them.
The everyman is a stock character of fiction. An ordinary and humble character, [3] [4] the everyman is generally a protagonist whose benign conduct fosters the audience's identification with them.
The term everyman was used as early as an English morality play from the early 1500s: The Summoning ofEveryman. [4] The play's protagonist is an allegorical character representing an ordinary human who knows he is soon to die; according to literature scholar Harry Keyishian he is portrayed as "prosperous, gregarious, [and] attractive". [6] Everyman is the only human character of the play; the others are embodied ideas such as Fellowship, who "symbolizes the transience and limitations of human friendship". [6]
The use of the term everyman to refer generically to a portrayal of an ordinary or typical person dates to the early 20th century. [7] The term everywoman [8] originates in the same period, having been used by George Bernard Shaw to describe the character Ann Whitefield of his play Man and Superman . [9]
An everyman is described with the intent that most audience members can readily identify with him. Although the everyman may face the same difficulties that a hero might, archetypal heroes react rapidly and vigorously by manifest action, whereas an everyman typically avoids engagement or reacts ambivalently, until the situation, growing dire, demands effective reaction to avert disaster. Such a "round", dynamic character—that is, a character showing complexity and development—is generally a protagonist. [10]
Or if lacking complexity and development—thus a "flat", static character—then the everyman is a secondary character.[ citation needed ] Especially in literature, there is often a narrator, as the written medium enables extensive explication of, for example, previous events, internal details, and mental content. An everyman narrator may be noticed little, whether by other characters or sometimes even by the reader. A narrating everyman, like Ché in the musical Evita , [11] [12] may even address the audience directly.[ citation needed ]
Big Brother is a character and symbol in George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party, Ingsoc, wields total power "for its own sake" over the inhabitants. In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens. The people are constantly reminded of this by the slogan "Big Brother is watching you": a maxim that is ubiquitously on display throughout the novel.
Harry Palmer is the name given to the anti-hero protagonist of several films based on spy novels written by Len Deighton, in which the main character is an unnamed intelligence officer. For convenience, the novels are also often referred to as the "Harry Palmer" novels.
A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from that storyteller's own personal point of view, using first-person grammar such as "I", "me", "my", and "myself". It must be narrated by a first-person character, such as a protagonist, re-teller, witness, or peripheral character. Alternatively, in a visual storytelling medium, the first-person perspective is a graphical perspective rendered through a character's visual field, so the camera is "seeing" out of a character's eyes.
Coming Up for Air is the seventh book and fourth novel by English writer George Orwell, published in June 1939 by Victor Gollancz. It was written between 1938 and 1939 while Orwell spent time recuperating from illness in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh. He delivered the completed manuscript to Victor Gollancz upon his return to London in March 1939.
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem: The Odyssey.
Evita is a musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice. It concentrates on the life of Argentine political leader Eva Perón, the second wife of Argentine president Juan Perón. The story follows Evita's early life, rise to power, charity work, and death.
Thriller is a genre of fiction with numerous, often overlapping, subgenres, including crime, horror, and detective fiction. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving their audiences heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. This genre is well suited to film and television.
Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel written in Spanish by Colombian, Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez and published in 1985. Edith Grossman's English translation was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1988.
Evita is a 1996 American musical-historical film based on the 1976 concept album of the same name produced by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, which also inspired a 1978 musical. The film depicts the life of Eva Perón, detailing her beginnings, rise to fame, political career and death at the age of 33. Directed by Alan Parker, and written by Parker and Oliver Stone, Evita stars Madonna as Eva, Jonathan Pryce as Eva's husband Juan Perón, and Antonio Banderas as Ché, an everyman who acts as the film's narrator.
Everyman is a stock character in drama, originally appearing in mediaeval morality plays.
Marina Lewycka is a British novelist of Ukrainian origin.
A reader model is the term used for the hypothetical average person who is the target audience for a product. A reader model can be made from the average behaviour of many product users by datamining things like loyalty cards. Based on data collected from datamining, an 'ordinary individual' (everyman) can be constructed (modeled) to develop the best strategy for selling to consumers. Reader models are used by corporations to direct consumer behaviour to their products. Marketing, advertising, and product placement use reader models as a central part of their planning and source the reader model by using focus groups. In plain language a reader model is used by corporations to predict who will buy the better mousetrap. The 'everyman' is used by commercial musicians, writers, and the movie industry trying to make money from a product that will appeal to a mass audience. These industries use the reader model to try to gauge and predict the consumer market in an effort to create and profit from a hit single, best seller, or a box office hit movie. A well-known example is the success of Jaws (novel), the film, and the theme music.
"Oh What a Circus" is a song from the 1976 musical Evita, which had lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was recorded by English singer David Essex and released as a single on August 19, 1978, by Mercury Records. Essex played the character of Che in the original London production of the musical, and the song is sung from his point-of-view. Produced and arranged by Mike Batt, "Oh What a Circus" is a mid-tempo song, comparing the musical's title character Eva Perón's funeral with a circus, and calling her actions fraudulent. The song is a contrafactum, and shares its tune with the better known "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" from the same show.
Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov written in first-person narrative. The narrator, a French literature professor who moves to New England and writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, becomes infatuated with a 12 year old girl named Dolores. Privately, he calls her "Lolita", the Spanish nickname for Dolores. The novel was originally written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. and Britain led to it being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press.
George J. Jetson is a fictional character from the animated television series The Jetsons. He is the patriarch of the Jetson family. He is the husband of Jane Jetson and the father of teenage daughter Judy and son Elroy.
Worst. Person. Ever. is the fourteenth novel by Douglas Coupland, published in 2013. The novel is the story of Raymond Gunt, an offensive and shocking narrator, and his journey from London through Los Angeles to Kiribati, an island in the Pacific Ocean, where he is to work on a reality television show. The novel focuses on this character's direct and inflammatory reflections on the world around him and the characters he meets. In an interview with NPR, Coupland stated that the novel was written as an antidote to an "epidemic of earnestness", and that the book was motivated by the question, "Why not just go against a trend and write something that might damage a person's soul if they read it?"
The Narrator is a fictional character and the antihero protagonist of the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club, its 1999 film adaptation of the same name, and the comic books Fight Club 2 and Fight Club 3. The character is an insomniac with a split personality, and is depicted as an unnamed everyman during the day, who becomes the chaotic and charismatic Tyler Durden at night during periods of insomnia.
Milkman is a historical psychological fiction novel written by the Northern Irish author Anna Burns. Set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the story follows an 18-year-old girl, "middle sister," who is harassed by an older married man known as "the milkman" and then as "Milkman". It is Burns's first novel to be published after Little Constructions in 2007, and is her third overall.
Citizen X or CitizenX may refer to: