For a story to be complete, the audience needs another view of the battle as well--that of the soldier in the trenches. Instead of looking at the Story Mind from the outside, the Main Character Throughline is a view from the inside. What if that Story Mind were our own? That is what the audience experiences when it becomes a soldier on the field. Audience members identify with the Main Character of the story. This is the personal, first person, "I" perspective.

Through the Main Character we experience the battle as if we were directly taking part in it. From this perspective we are much more concerned with what is happening immediately around us than we are with the larger strategies that are too big to see. This most personally involved argument of the story is the Main Character Throughline.

Other names often associated with the Main Character are the Primary Character, the Principle Character, the Hero, the Protagonist, and others.

As we shall explore shortly, the Main Character does not have to be the soldier leading the charge in the battle as a whole. Our Main Character might be any of the soldiers on the field: the cook, the medic, the bugler, or even the recruit cowering in the bushes.