nonhero

Creegan is an inspired character, though, a nonhero who somehow manages a heroic moment or two.

It doesn't matter if that's really his name, though, because like Melville's enlightened nonhero, this man does not expect to survive the journey.

The nonhero of this ambitious first novel is a Scottish doctor whose consciousness of his moral mediocrity doesn't enable him to separate himself from his employer, the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

But unlike Kurosawa's civil servant, this emotionally desiccated nonhero fails to create much meaning; indeed, in his godless, mechanized world of petty preoccupations there doesn't seem to be much possibility of meaning at all, except perhaps in Mr. Lanchester's own mordantly witty way of describing his character's plight.