It usually happens late at night.
You are meant to be sleeping, or at least pretending to. The book is open on your chest; the light dims to something justifiable. You already know what’s coming. You have read this story before. You are aware that the character will deceive, transgress boundaries, and make irrevocable decisions.
Despite this knowledge, you choose to move on.
This is the first truth we often deny when reading. We do not return to books in search of role models. We return looking for permission.
If literature were about moral instruction alone, our shelves would look unique. They would be filled with characters who communicated clearly, acted ethically, and knew when to walk away. Instead, we remember the ones who wanted too much, loved recklessly, and mistook obsession for destiny. We reread their stories not with approval, but with recognition.
And recognition is far more unsettling.
Take Jay Gatsby, the luminous centre of The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, at the height of America’s Jazz Age. Fitzgerald was a chronicler of excess, glamour, and disappointment, a writer who understood how ambition could intoxicate and corrode simultaneously. Gatsby fabricates his past, manipulates social circles, and devotes his life to pursuing a woman who has already chosen someone else.
On the surface, Gatsby is a cautionary tale.
In practice, readers ache for him.
Why?
Gatsby’s deepest flaw is not dishonesty. It is a belief. He believes desire can be perfected, that love can be engineered through effort and spectacle, and that time itself can be reversed if one simply wants it badly enough. His tragedy is not that he deceives others, but that he deceives himself.
Most readers would never admit to such devotion out loud. Many have lived some version of it quietly.
Then there is Heathcliff, created by Emily Brontë, an intensely private English writer who published just one novel in her lifetime. Brontë, writing in the mid-19th century, presented a character so raw that it disturbed early readers. Heathcliff is shaped by abandonment, class cruelty, and rejection. He responds not with healing but with vengeance that poisons everyone around him, long after the original wound has been inflicted.
Nothing is charming about Heathcliff’s cruelty. And still, readers search for him, defend him, and argue over him.
Why?
Heathcliff compels us to confront a question we often shun. What happens when pain is never transformed into wisdom? What happens when suffering becomes identity rather than experience? Literature does not soften the answer. It follows the consequences all the way down.
This is where the antihero does their quiet psychological work.
In daily life, we are trained from an early age to manage ourselves. Anger must be reasonable. Desire must be discreet. Envy must be disguised as ambition. We learn which emotions are acceptable and that these must be concealed behind politeness, productivity, or moral language. Fiction offers an exemption from this discipline. Within its pages, we are allowed to feel reckless.
The anti-hero becomes a container for dangerous emotions.
When we root for characters who lie, cheat, or destroy themselves, we are not endorsing their behaviour. We are acknowledging their recognisability: Gatsby’s obsession, Heathcliff’s rage, and Anna Karenina’s defiance — these are exaggerated versions of emotions many people experience in quieter, socially acceptable doses. Fiction amplifies them so we can see them clearly.
Psychologist Carl Jung called this suppressed dimension of the self the “shadow” — the parts of us we disown to maintain a coherent moral identity. The literature does not ask us to eliminate the shadow. It asks us to recognise it. Anti-heroes speak their language fluently.
This is why purely virtuous characters often feel thin. They reassure us, but they rarely illuminate us. They behave as we are supposed to, not as we usually do. Anti-heroes endure because they mirror contradiction. Hey, love and damage. They justify and regret. They reach for goodness and sabotage it through fear, pride, or longing.
We do not read them to imitate their choices. We read them to understand our own.
There is a quieter discomfort beneath our affection for villains. Anti-heroes disrupt the comforting myth that suffering automatically produces kindness. We like to believe that hardship builds character and that pain refines the soul. Characters like Heathcliff challenge that narrative. Pain, they suggest, can also curdle. Trauma does not guarantee compassion. Occasionally, it sharpens cruelty instead.
This is not a pleasant idea. It is an honest one.
And honesty is something literature does better than moral instruction.
It is also worth noting how generously we allow fictional characters the complexity we increasingly deny real people. In books, we tolerate contradiction. We accept that someone can be both wounded and harmful, both understandable and responsible. Outside of fiction, particularly in the age of instant judgement and public outrage, we are far less patient. We demand clarity. We sort people quickly into heroes and villains and move on.
We grant fictional lives more moral nuance than human ones.
This may be because fiction feels safe. It allows us to practice empathy without consequences and explore moral grey zones without neatly resolving them. Anti-heroes train us to sit with discomfort rather than rushing toward a verdict. They resist the urge for moral shortcuts.
That resistance is quietly radical.
What if we defend fictional villains not because we lack morals but because we finally recognise ourselves without having to confess?
This is the question anti-heroes leave behind, whether we ask it or not.
They remind us that darkness does not arrive wearing a warning label. It grows out of love, fear, unmet need, and unexamined longing. It grows out of a recognisable human soul. The danger, literature suggests, is failing to acknowledge this capacity within ourselves. The danger lies in denying it.
When we close these books, the task is not to choose a side — it’s to carry the insight forward. We must be aware of our own self-justifications. We must be mindful of our romanticised grievances. We should be aware of our moments when pain tempts us to justify harm.
The anti-hero does not ask us to become worse people. The antihero encourages us to become more honest individuals. These concepts may explain why we keep going, even at night, when we know what’s coming.