Shakespeare seems to be hinting that Shylock cares more about money than family; but being a good playwright, he does not say this outright, and instead puts the opinion in the mouth of his character Bassanio. 
          The second point, which is reinforced in Lorenzo’s speech, is Shylock’s ability to manipulate people through words (“…How every fool can play upon the word!”) In Shylock’s tirade-like speech in 3.1, he uses many superfluous words to hammer home the point that he feels he is being mistreated on the grounds of his culture and religion. At 3.1.46-49, instead of merely saying that Antonio disgraced him, Shylock gives the reader exact details on how Antonio has made his life miserable (“…He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned/ my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated/ mine enemies…”). Shylock does this to lend his speech dramatic effect, in the hopes of gathering sympathy for himself. Shakespeare again does not outrightly condemn this character trait of Shylock’s, but instead uses Lorenzo’s speech and the subsequent characters’ dialogue in 3.5 to illustrate how easy it is for any man to manipulate words to his own liking. Thus in an indirect way, Shakespeare uses the speeches of Shylock, Bassanio, and Lorenzo to comment on human nature.

The phrase “fiction,” by nature, covers a wide range of sub-genres in modern literature, from drama to mystery to fantasy epic. However, there is one uniting force behind all forms of fiction writing. One might say that without this element, a work of fiction would be impossible. That element is the hero, the character whose actions lead the narrative along, and through whose eyes we often see much of the action contained in a work of fiction. It is the struggle of a hero—whether against the world or himself—that leaves readers captivated, and causes them to continue reading to the end of a work. 
As society has evolved, the literary device of the hero has essentially been replaced by the antihero, a protagonist of ambiguous moral standing who is merely trying to make his way in a similarly morally ambiguous world. As Christianity has started to release its grasp on Western cultures, the conventions of the traditional hero have fallen away, leaving many members of society today in such a state that they can more easily identify with the latter than the former.
The term antihero has been defined as referring to “a protagonist notably lacking in heroic qualities.” (Merriam-Webster Online) In more specific terms, an antihero is “…a protagonist who has the opposite of most of the traditional attributes of a hero. [A character who] may be bewildered, ineffectual, deluded, or merely pathetic. Often what antiheroes learn, if they learn anything at all, is that the world isolates them in an existence devoid of God and absolute values.”