Protagonist and Antagonist in: Guts

Guts, a novel by Gary Paulsen

Alex Nedera

Protagonist, Antagonist and Conflict

       The Protagonist in my book is the main author, Gary. The book talks of the adventures he had, in his youth. Gary lived mainly alone, because he ran away when he was fourteen, because he decided that a life spent traveling with a carnival was more interesting than a life of manual labor in a village. This book does not talk of this, but some research was done when this blog was written. Before traveling with the carnival however, he was a good student. To pay his school bills, he had to hunt big and small game with rifle and arrow.
         The Antagonist in Guts is nature, as a whole. In all of his adventures his adversaries are always mosquitoes, mooses, flies, starvation or something else along those lines. All of the aforementioned come/happen because of nature, therefore the antagonist is nature. Sometimes however, the antagonist is simply bad luck. In one instance, Gary was in a canoe with another person. A slight turbulence in the water happened just as Gary's canoe partner shifted his weight onto another part of the canoe causing the whole thing to flip askew and everything to sink into the water. This included spare clothes, food and drinkable water. After this incident, Gary and the other man were harassed by Horseflies -  which eat flesh - and spent the next month or so trying desperately to survive. To do this as a thirty year old man is difficult. This is why the antagonist is Nature. Logically, the conflict would be Man vs Nature.