Protagonist

Character Role Analysis

Tom

The protagonist, or main character, is the person the book is all about. There's a great clue right in the title that Tom is our guy since "the Great Brain" is his nickname. Because J.D. is the narrator, we might be tempted to think he's the protagonist, but we need to look at where he turns the lens: most of the time, our eyes are fixed squarely on Tom.

There's one more point we need to make: Sometimes we think of the protagonist as the "good guy," but Tom isn't always. He's more of what we might call an antihero. Most of the time, he's motivated by less than stellar motives, like greed and pride (that's the "anti" part), but we root for him anyway, and we can't help liking and admiring him just a bit (and that's the "hero" part).