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The Perfect Anti-hero Imagine a hero. What does he look like? A bald, old, fat man or a young, athletic man? Probably the second one. Both of these descriptions, however, are supposed to portray an anti-hero named John Anderton from the novella Minority Report. An anti-hero is the exact opposite of what you would think a hero to be. Anti-heroes have characteristics such as selfishness, paranoia, and fearfulness. All of these characteristics were shown by John Anderton in the book version of Minority Report, but not so much in the film. In the book Minority Report, John Anderton is an old man who is fearful of many things. This is shown immediately at the beginning of the book when he is afraid that his new assistant Danny Witwer is going to be taking over his job. Because of this, John didn’t take much of a liking to him. Soon after that, he reads a card that the pre-cogs have just made in which his name is listed as a future murderer. When he sees this, he fears that he is going to kill Witwer. This leads him to overthink the situation and become paranoid. John Anderton begins to think that Witwer has set him up. He thinks that Witwer somehow put his name on the card so he would murder him and lose his job. When John tells his wife about this, she proves him wrong by showing him that the victim’s name on the card is not Witwer’s. The name on the card was Leopold Kaplan; a man John had never even heard of before. This led him to become even more paranoid than before. If it wasn’t Witwer who set him up, then who was it? And why did they set him up to kill a man he didn’t even know? Later on in the novella, John becomes suspicious of his wife’s true motives. He believes that she knows something more than he does, and that she is working against him instead of for him. Because of this, he ends up almost letting her be killed, which puts great emphasis on the selfish aspect of him. By the end of the novel, John Anderton kills