Everyman
Quick answer: An everyman is an ordinary protagonist who stands in for the rest of us. Learn where the term comes from, why writers use one, and how to keep yours from going bland.
The everyman is fiction's ordinary person: an unexceptional protagonist whose experiences invite the reader to think, that could be me. In other words, the character's power comes not from talent, destiny or beauty but from being recognisably average in a story that is not. The name descends from 'Everyman', a fifteenth-century English morality play whose hero literally represents all of humanity summoned to account for its life.
The everyman lives in satire, comedy, horror and social fiction, anywhere a writer wants extraordinary events measured against an ordinary yardstick. As craft, the choice is made at conception: you are deciding that the story's interest will come from the situation, the world or the theme, and that the protagonist's job is to be the reader's proxy inside it.
Bloom, Akaky and the power of the unremarkable
James Joyce built 'Ulysses' around Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser of no particular distinction, and spent an epic's worth of technique on one ordinary Dublin day. The wager of the book is exactly the everyman's wager: that an average life, looked at closely enough, contains everything the old heroes contained. Bloom eats, walks, grieves, endures small humiliations, and the novel treats each as worthy of the fullest attention literature can pay.
Gogol's 'The Overcoat' runs the opposite experiment at miniature scale. Akaky Akakievich is a copying clerk so unremarkable his colleagues barely see him, and the story lets one modest desire, a warm new coat, become his whole cosmos. When the coat is stolen, the loss lands like a tragedy because Gogol has calibrated the scale of an ordinary life so precisely. Douglas Adams later played the same card for comedy: Arthur Dent in his dressing gown, blinking at the end of the world.
What ordinariness buys you
The everyman purchases identification cheaply and instantly. Readers do not need persuading to care about someone like themselves; the recognition does the bonding. He also provides scale. Horror is more frightening, satire sharper and wonder more wondrous when registered by someone with no special equipment for coping. A wizard meeting a dragon is Tuesday; a tax clerk meeting one is a story.
The risks are blandness and passivity. A character defined only by being normal can become a hole in the middle of the book, someone to whom things merely happen. And there is a subtler failure: writers sometimes confuse generic with universal, sanding off every specific trait in the hope of fitting everyone, and producing a person who resembles no one at all.
How to write an everyman with a pulse
Build the ordinariness out of specifics. A believable everyman has a particular job, particular irritations, a particular way of stacking the dishes; the universality comes from the texture being true, not from the details being absent. Give him one stubborn trait, a small vanity or a private code, that survives contact with the extraordinary and lets him push back on events rather than only absorb them.
The trap to avoid is the purely reactive protagonist. Even a bewildered nobody must make choices that alter the story's direction, or the reader's identification turns into the reader's boredom. In a short story, get the ordinary life on its feet fast, in a paragraph of well-chosen routine, then break it, and make every subsequent decision genuinely his.
It also pays to decide what your everyman is quietly good at. Ordinary lives train real competencies: reading a queue, calming a customer, knowing when a machine is about to fail. Let the plot eventually need one of those humble skills. The moment an unremarkable ability becomes the story's hinge, the reader feels the type's whole argument proven: ordinary people are enough.
Neighbours and opposites
The chosen one is the everyman's structural opposite: marked from birth, gifted, prophesied. Interestingly, many chosen-one stories smuggle in an everyman opening, the farm boy or cupboard child, precisely to borrow the type's relatability before the destiny arrives. The stock character differs on depth: a stock figure is a recognisable convention with no interior, while a good everyman is fully rounded, just unremarkable.
Do not confuse the everyman with the antihero either. The antihero lacks virtue; the everyman lacks distinction, and may be quietly decent to the bone. Writory's short story judges score Character and Emotional Impact on how deeply a reader is made to feel, and an ordinary character rendered with specific, honest detail routinely outscores a dazzling one rendered in generalities.
What poets can take from this
- Make the ordinariness specific: real job, real habits, real small irritations.
- Give your everyman one trait that resists the plot instead of merely enduring it.
- Let him make at least one decision the story could not survive without.
- Use his lack of special skills to raise the cost of every obstacle.
- Beware sanding off detail to fit everyone; generic is not universal.
- Read Gogol's 'The Overcoat' for the full course in scaling an ordinary life to tragic size.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a supermarket shift worker is the only witness to something impossible, and their most ordinary skill, learned entirely from the day job, turns out to be the one thing that matters.
Questions
Where does the term everyman come from?
From the fifteenth-century English morality play 'Everyman', whose protagonist stands for all humanity as Death calls him to account. The name later broadened to describe any ordinary character built to represent the common reader.
Can an everyman character be a woman?
Yes. The term is traditional rather than gendered, and some writers say everywoman. What defines the type is ordinariness used as a lens: an unexceptional person through whom exceptional events are measured.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.