Protagonist and Antagonist

Every literary work has a protagonist, or leading character. In some cases, this character might not be a human but an abstraction, such as an entire community or an inanimate object that is given a human personality. In The Desperate Hours, there can be some confusion about who is the protagonist. The most obvious candidate is Dan Hilliard; he is given the most dramatic choices in the play and is most involved in the action. On the other hand, the first scene begins with Jesse Bard responding to the news of the prison break, and ends with Bard having his sense of the basic goodness of humankind restored. Bard's story is secondary, though, to the main action, so Hilliard should be considered the play's protagonist.

There is no such ambiguity about who the play's antagonist might be. The antagonist is the character who has the opposite...