protagonist

When we meet Dusty, the laconic protagonist of “Rebuilding,” he has already lost so much.

At one point, Mr. Loomis quotes his protagonist sagely predicting, “we’ll have a depression . . . and it will be the end of an era.”

The key to the scene was practice, but the other trick was to pare it back from the planned crowd scene to the two protagonists.

“I want to be in a normal place!” she blurts out in one of their last conversations, almost as if she were a musical protagonist about to break into song.

Louis likens himself to Pierre, the main protagonist in War & Peace, who represents the "everyman" as the illegitimate son of a rich aristocrat who inherits a huge fortune, catapulting him into Russian high society.