I'm going to copy and paste what I wrote for one of the discussion posts here, I will address it more the coming week:

I believe that the article "Protagonist and Antagonist: Beyond Hero and Villain" is a well-intentioned, but ultimately limited perspective on examining characters and conflicts in a piece of fiction. Mr. Hull presents some useful tips: A protagonist doesn't need to be nice; Center the conflict around a theme; an Author should remove themselves from biased perspective; etc.. However, he seems to have authored the article to support burgeoning authors, attempting to educate dilettantes who lack formal training. In doing so, Hull fails to address some very important aspects in interpreting fiction (especially pod):

Extra-Character Conflict
Any number of forces can create pressure, add conflict, or otherwise interact with characters in a meaningful way. This could be anything from Entropy in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Fate in Oedipus the King, Hate & Fear in Huckleberry Finn, to Self in Kafka's The Metamorphosis. These forces have tangible effect on the progression of plot, and can be more of a protagonist or antagonist than any character; indeed, some characters may only be an extension of such an inhuman and un-character-like concept.

At High School, this was presented as “Character vs. Concept”: Man vs. Self, or Man vs. Society, Man vs. Fate, and so forth. In the case of The Simulacra, I would make a case for Civilization or Order being the capital-letter concept, with the resulting equation looking something like “Humanity vs. Order”. We see not so much a single character struggling against or for civilization, rather, each character attempts to define their own version of order a reality: Nicole represents the stagnant police state; Dr. Superb maintaining his practice because he knows nothing else; Duncan idolizes the cult of personality; Goltz and his shadowy Council play puppet-master with all sides. This obsession with order puts these characters, which Hull would call antagonists, in opposition to our modern sensibilities of Freedom, or perhaps more Phildickian, Chaos.

On the side of Chaos, we have the characters that act as proponents of radical individuality or act against the established order, though this rebellion need not be dramatic: The Chuppers working outside the social norm, Loony Luke providing an escape to Mars, and of course Kongrosian. Kongrosian does not fit in any society, cannot interact within a structure other than his unintelligible neuroses, and breaks space-time-continuity by just existing; Kongrosian is the champion of this conflict, Hull might go so far as label him the protagonist, but that feels like a cop-out. The conflict is not as crude as “Kongrosian pursues the destruction of order and considers the value of doing so, while Goltz seeks to stop the destruction of order, and forces us to reconsider the value of doing so” instead, PKD uses a barrage of characters in an equally varied number of situations that illustrate the central conflict. Choosing a single protagonist and antagonist would be an exercise in futility, as well as supremely difficult. Hull's narrow focus is a result, I think, of High School English teachers seeing in each text a "Right Answer" whereinHamlet is about "death", the Mississippi in Huck Finn represents "freedom", and so forth, in an attempt to provide a pattern of perception for the wayward High School student. The reality is, there is no right answer, everything is subjective, blah blah blah.

Resolution is for Quitters
Hall writes, “The Story Goal represents that final step in the resolution process. Complete it and the characters have resolution. Leave it open and the problem persists far beyond the walls of the story.” Maybe taking Dr. Berry’s Post-Modernism class is to fault, but I do not feel like resolution is at all necessary to make a coherent story; PKD seems to agree with me. Take the end of the two novels we have covered: Do Androids leaves a shaken Deckard in debt, and over the internal struggles of killing androids; he’ll keep killing them because he needs the money. No real resolution there, even if the Andy's have been killed, Deckard knows he could run into a group of identical andys the next day. The Simulacra ends with Kongrosian saving Nicole, and a war started; we don’t know if the war will create unrest and destroy the established order, or anything else, all we know is that the Chuppers are excited. What has been resolved? Order has been momentarily broken by Kongrosian, but not for good, as Planck notes it will be traded for the Chuppers version of Order, “We're going to have to get accustomed to them.”

Resolution, as examined through Hall's Story Goals, does not allow for more subtle manipulations of story that result in truly great story telling. McCarthy's The Road ends, but there is no real resolution, life simply limps onward, although I am a little wary of being able to accurately engage McCarthy critically. Point is, a neat-and-tidy resolution is like the dime-a-dozen supernatural romance novels at Barnes & Nobel who feature such an ending: Stagnant, insulting, and predictable.
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