Tam O’Shanter

Tam O’Shanter is many things—he is carefree, reckless, curious, sensual, full of appetite and energy—but he is hardly admirable. As the central character of a large-scale narrative, Tam would be expected to be the story’s hero and to behave heroically. Tam lacks the higher dimensions traditionally associated with heroes since Homer. He makes poor decisions; he is selfish, he lacks control of his impulses, he drinks compulsively and disregards the feelings and needs of his wife. He is neither brave, moral, or noble.

Yet, a reader cannot help but sympathize with Tam and his increasingly dangerous dilemma. In this, Tam O’Shanter represents an anti-hero, a literary tradition that positions thoroughly unheroic but nevertheless likable characters in the center of a narrative where their fumbling (mis)fortune endows the character with a kind of sympathy, even a grudging endearment. Unlike those towering heroic figures from the epics of Antiquity, Tam is one of us placed in a position where with luck and a bit of scrappy resourcefulness he triumphs despite not because of who he is. From the daring Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost to the befuddled Hamlet and Disney’s charismatic Captain Jack Sparrow, the figure of the reprobate emerges as someone who commands a level of admiration and down-to-earth relatability.