Confidant

The confidant (feminine confidante) is "a character in a story whom a protagonist confides in and trusts." The role's job, as the article frames it, is to listen to the protagonist's secrets, examine their character and advise them on their actions, and beyond passive listening a confidant may act to move the story forward or guide and represent the reactions of the audience. The article traces the type in Western literature back to Greek drama and Euripides, whose Agamemnon in Hecuba and Pylades in Orestes serve as both counsellors for the protagonists and expositors of their character, and the role won its prominence in seventeenth-century French drama. Horatio in Hamlet is the standard English example, a reporter of events and an auditor for the protagonist.

For a novelist the confidant solves a rendering problem: interiority that would stay narrated becomes dialogue on the page, and what the protagonist chooses to confess characterizes both parties at once. The article also records the role's decline in modern literature, citing Georg Lukács on the significant absence of the confidant among the isolated protagonists of the modern novel, whose loneliness is the point. In a large cast the confidant sits naturally beside the deuteragonist: Greek practice freed the second actor to play confidant once the tritagonist took the adversary parts. Against the foil, who defines the protagonist by contrast, the confidant defines by attention.