Hidden Bodies

Caroline Kepnes’s You series began in 2014 amidst a wave of popular media featuring antiheroes: protagonists or main characters whose charisma, attractiveness, and cunning are complicated by immoral, violent, or criminal behavior. In contrast to the traditional hero archetype, which is generally aligned with the pursuit of personal growth and innate integrity, antiheroes have ambiguous ethics that are often defined by personal ambition. In 2014, Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster novel Gone Girl had been wildly popular for two years. Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter novels took the antihero approach to another level, making his central character a serial killer. On television, Breaking Bad and the adaption of Dexter were, respectively, recently concluded and concluding. The previous decade had seen the rise of Tony Soprano, another charming, clever criminal for whom audiences mostly rooted, despite his despicable actions.

Joe Goldberg fits comfortably into the territory shared by Dexter Morgan and Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne. He is attractive, charming, petty, driven by sinister compulsions and appetites, and places little to no value on human lives other than his own. People—particularly women—are drawn to Joe because of his looks and charisma, but they cannot sustain his interest—or avoid his rage—without meeting his needs and priorities. He is mostly uncompromising and largely incapable of real moral evolution. In this vein, he is similar to a vast array of antiheroes both modern and classic, such as Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs, the vampire Lestat from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and many others.

The use of an antihero as a protagonist places readers in a provocative position. What does it say about readers who want Joe to avoid responsibility for murder? Antiheroes contribute to dramatic tension by creating a moral quandary for the reader, who experiences the suspense of an unresolved transgression from the perspective of the person trying to get away with it. Part of the appeal of a character like Dexter or Joe Goldberg lies in the fact that they view the world differently than people who possess empathy. Joe’s humorous confusions and acerbic judgments are relentless in the You novels, and because Joe lacks a filter in his internal monologues, he can express his opinions about something like social media or Hollywood as viciously as readers might wish they could. In this sense, the antihero functions similarly to horror tropes; though the reader may have no desire to encounter what’s depicted in the novel in real life, the sensationalized violence offers the opportunity to consider ethical assumptions from a unique perspective.