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Speaking of the profound difference between mid-Victorian fiction and the modern novel, V.S. Pritchett (1985) contrasts George Eliot's optimism with the “downward path,” and the “failures of the will” that characterize the contemporary novel. He goes on to say that “We do not wish to be better than we are…. The bottom has fallen out of our world.” Pritchett sees Eliot as a writer who still had faith in the possibility that her characters could redeem themselves from their frailties, which otherwise would doom them to inevitable punishment by an unforgiving environment. Eliot's strong protagonists, like Adam Bede or Daniel Deronda, possess a firm sense of identity, and by acting in conformity with their true needs they overcome the obstacles that life places in their path. Even Eliot's “weak” characters, such as Hetty in Adam Bede, possess the strength of will to actively pursue their fate, knowing that they have earned it through their own actions, however ill-advised.
Such integral characters, whether strong or weak, no longer exist in modern fiction, where all lofty mountaintops are Sysiphus-land, and there are no limits to how far one can fall, even from no great height. The fictional antiheroes of our time cannot scale the moral heights because they possess neither the wish to attain virtue nor the principled attachment to vice, which at least admits of the possibility of repudiation as a deliberate act. Their energies are absorbed by the impossible task of keeping the self from disintegrating, like the panic-stricken protagonists of Joyce Carol Oates or the desperate narcissists of Harry Crews' novels. James F. Masterson (1988) has described the real-life prototypes of today's fictional antiheroes in The Search for the Real Self, in which he analyzes the numerous manifestations of the “false self.” The false self is based on lifeinhibiting defensiveness against pain and produces rigid, self-destructive patterns of behavior accompanied by despair.
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