Heroes And Villains In The Song Of Roland

Villains and heroes make up the plots of stories. You can’t have a story without a villain who will do whatever it takes to destroy someone’s happiness or destroy the world. But just because you have those characters does not mean it is always easy to figure out who is who. A lot of times heroes are just people who take out the bad guy and has his or her own personal issues. Whatever the case may be when it comes to our villains and their stories they always have a few things in common. They want to either hurt the protagonist or some other innocent, they are hateful, mean, and typically start off psychotic or end psychotic. Whether or not they are any better than the hero they always have features that are ten times worse than the protagonist and do things that are not normal to day to day society. Author’s use these villains to make the …show more content…
If you give a villain who is blatantly bad and a hero who is only somewhat bad you are going to root for the hero without a doubt. If you take Ganelon from The Song of Roland, you can see how most villains are a lot like him. Somewhere along the lines of the book he ruins someone’s life, kills, and gets revenge over something insignificant or something that could have been resolved had ego not been at stake.
In most stories the two main characters are typically the villain and the hero who fight either for the greater good or for selfish reasons. When reading these stories however the reader at times will find two main characters who both have villain like traits. In The Song of Roland you have the protagonist, Roland and the antagonist Ganelon who both have villain like traits, however the reader finds himself placing Roland in the