Everyman

The everyman is "a stock character of fiction," "an ordinary and humble character," "generally a protagonist whose benign conduct fosters the audience's identification with them." The name descends from the sixteenth-century English morality play The Summoning of Everyman, whose hero stands for any person facing death; the generic sense of a typical person is early twentieth century, and George Bernard Shaw coined "everywoman" for Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman. Behavior is diagnostic: where archetypal heroes act "rapidly and vigorously," an everyman "typically avoids engagement or reacts ambivalently" until circumstances force action. The article's cases run from Leopold Bloom in Ulysses to Arthur Dent, Winston Smith, Charlie Brown and Homer Simpson.

The everyman is the reader's delegate in an extraordinary story: because he arrives with no special gifts, the world's dangers and wonders have to be credible in ordinary terms, and that identification is the payoff. He is the natural opposite of the chosen one, special by nothing rather than by destiny, and a quiet, reliable shape for a protagonist in speculative fiction, where the reader learns the rules alongside him. The craft risk is passivity, an everyman pushed through events he never decides; give him choices that cost, or the plot is merely happening to him.