How to fit an empathetic protagonist into a modern satire?

Question

I'm having trouble reconciling how a protagonist with a goal can fit within the intended function of a modern satire. To my understanding a satire is ridiculing a subject. Yet, isn't it necessary for there to exist a protagonist whose struggle and goal the audience can identify with and follow? If the protagonist and their goal are being satirized, wouldn't the audience just find them both too ridiculous to be concerned with? And as a result, wouldn't the audience lose interest in the work?

Answer 1

The protagonist in a satire need not be someone the audience identifies with. He could be a figure of derision, while the reader identifies with an implicit or explicit narrative point of view.

If you must have a likable protagonist, he could be someone who has to struggle against the things being satirized. Or someone who is initially identified with the target of the satire who gradually comes to understand the foolishness of his ways.

Answer 2

The protagonist needs to be someone whose struggle and goal the audience can identify with and follow, the satire needs to also be something the audience can identify with. It should be relatively easy, even under the constraints of a true to life protagonist to find things to ridicule. Real life is full of satirical subject, whether by personality content or situation. If it seems to ridiculous to follow work out the generalizations first, the time-line/storyline and plot flow. Tone it down. Get a draft together and then revise for satirical situation and dialog content. I guess what I'm saying is...What's the point? Decide that first, lay that out. Get to the guffaws in the revision if it's not flowing for you from the start.

Answer 3

There are several kinds of satire. One is Horatian (named for Horace): A gentle, sympathetic form of satire in which the subject is mildly made fun of with a show of engaging wit. This form of satire tends to ask the audience to laugh at themselves as much as the players.

From the web site cited:

SATIRE has the shape of fragmentation. In satire, chaos isn't far away. In satire, cities become wastelands; school rooms become blackboard jungles; society becomes a mob or groups of gangs, marriage becomes a mere convenience or disappears altogether; all the signs of civilized life lose their glue, the whole social fabric threatens to come apart.

Every work of modern satire has a feeling of moral outrage at its core. And it proceeds in at least two ways: it can be written to condemn --as Swift wrote A Modest Proposal to condemn the English or as Anthony Burgess wrote Clockwork Orange. Or it can be written to heal -- as Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, or as Will Rogers commented on politics -- to warn and to heal.

It is as though the personalities of satirists are of two basic kinds: each sees evil and folly. One wants to destroy evil, to satirize it out of existence. The other wants to use irony to cure it , to coax it back to health with satire, however bitter the pill. The first two famous Greek satirists differed in just these ways. Juvenile was a satirical executioner (Juvenalian satire). Horace was a satirical physician (Horatian satire). And Joyce is both, sometimes both at once.

This is masha speaking: What you want to be is a satirical physician, to write the Horatian kind of satire, to cure evil by presenting a sympathetic/empathetic protagonist.