Actor Gary Cooper served as an idealized everyman during the "golden age of Hollywood", appearing as the protagonist in movies such as 1952's High Noon.^[1][2]

The everyman is a stock character of fiction. An ordinary and humble character,^[3][4] the everyman is generally a protagonist whose benign conduct fosters the audience's identification with them.

Origin and history

The Parable of the Good Samaritan features an everyman type character who suffers but receives compassion at the hands of the Samaritan.^[5]

The term everyman was used as early as an English morality play from the early 1500s: The Summoning of Everyman.^[4] The play's protagonist is an allegorical character representing an ordinary human who knows he is soon to die; according to literature scholar Harry Keyishian he is portrayed as "prosperous, gregarious, [and] attractive".^[6] Everyman is the only human character of the play; the others are embodied ideas such as Fellowship, who "symbolizes the transience and limitations of human friendship".^[6]

The use of the term everyman to refer generically to a portrayal of an ordinary or typical person dates to the early 20th century.^[7] The term everywoman^[8] originates in the same period, having been used by George Bernard Shaw to describe the character Ann Whitefield of his play Man and Superman.^[9]

Narrative uses

An everyman is described with the intent that most audience members can readily identify with him. Although the everyman may face the same difficulties that a hero might, archetypal heroes react rapidly and vigorously by manifest action, whereas an everyman typically avoids engagement or reacts ambivalently, until the situation, growing dire, demands effective reaction to avert disaster. Such a "round", dynamic character—that is, a character showing complexity and development—is generally a protagonist.^[10]

Or if lacking complexity and development—thus a "flat", static character—then the everyman is a secondary character. Especially in literature, there is often a narrator, as the written medium enables extensive explication of, for example, previous events, internal details, and mental content. An everyman narrator may be noticed little, whether by other characters or sometimes even by the reader. A narrating everyman, like Ché in the musical Evita,^[11][12] may even address the audience directly.

List of examples

See also

Look up everyman in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Average Joe – wholly average person
• Commoner – person neither nobility, royalty, nor priesthood
• Elckerlijc – Dutch medieval morality play
• Everyman's right – freedom to roam
• Joe Bloggs – British generic average man
• John Doe – generic everyman used in English-speaking countries
• John Q. Public – generic, hypothetical "common man"
• Kafkaesque – everyman being overwhelmed by vast, dehumanizing social labyrinth
• Man on the Bondi tram – hypothetical reasonable Australian
• Person having ordinary skill in the art
• Reasonable person – term helping a jury interpret a law's wording
• Straight man
• T.C. Mits – acronym for "the celebrated man in the street"
• The man on the Clapham omnibus – hypothetical reasonable person
• Zé Povinho – Portuguese everyman

References