While Kim was reading a novel, she began to hate one of her protagonists. And we’re not talking about the bad guys, not even characters that the author deliberately placed on the dark side, like Annie Wilkes, the creepy nurse and mad fan of writer Paul Sheldon in Stephen King’s Misery. Rather, this report aims to explore the annoying, hateful character that drives us crazy; Because they are poisonous, because they are cowardly, because they are inconsistent, or because their actions are harmful without necessarily being inherently evil.
It should be clarified that the tradition of characters baffling the reader can already be found in popular fairy tales, just as the mother of Little Red Riding Hood sends a girl—inexplicably—on a path she is sure to take unaccompanied. There are wild wolves. In some cases, the author’s intent to offend the reader is clear, as in the case of Humbert Humert in Lolita. Nabokov is a master at infuriating the reader, as he probably did in his masterpiece about incestuous love, The Island or Burning. However, the will of the author is not always so transparent.
parents
There are many examples in the literature of husbands and fathers pulling us out of our boxes. A clear example is Yasha Mazur, the protagonist of The Wizard of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Flirtatious and selfish, she wreaks havoc on the lives she touches, and despite the author’s compassion she cannot help feeling a strong anger towards the character.
Another is Sam Pollitt, the protagonist of a literary marvel that didn’t get the place it deserved in Cristina Stead’s Olympus: The Man Who Loved Children. In this novel, Sam Pollitt is the father of six loving children caught in the cold war of a decaying marriage heading for the pit of poverty. Here, the loving and optimistic father is also a manipulator, making his children the side victims of the destructive marital relationship.
A more recent event is the flight of his father, James Edwin Fenn (Jim), to David Vann’s perhaps highly acclaimed Sukkwan Island. Trapped in the shadow of his life and emotional failings, a man decides to sell everything and exercise survival with his teenage son to a remote island where they can live in the wilderness. The desire to start a new life is disturbed by the incompetence of the father who does not forget his ghosts, and eventually creates a tense and claustrophobic situation in which the boy witnesses his father losing his sanity and sanity.
While we can find countless examples in Amos Oz’s character Jana, the unhappy and tormented wife of Sweetheart Michael, or in family literature teachers like Anne Tyler or Alice Munro, and to give a patriotic example, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón’s great novel Derecho Natural’s family Demis Roussos, who disappeared for a long time in his life and seems cheerful over and over again, has his wandering father, little actor, and impersonator.
Natural disasters
Another obnoxious character is the person who leaves himself for the rest of his life. Disastrous people who are very grateful for fiction but also grateful for our hostility. A classic case is the main character of The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. On the street, but lacking in determination, he is the hero of countless events and misfortunes, which in one way or another result from his own inaction.
But if there’s an undeniable loathing in this category, it’s Ignatius Reilly, on which The Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is built. Dirty, reckless, onanist, gullible, arrogant, and eloquent, Reilly is probably the perfect example of how you can create a fiction with a protagonist that is a priori disgusting to readers.
While the term yuppie may seem a little unfamiliar to young readers, there was a time when successful and wealthy executives were defined that way. Patrick Bateman, the sickly narcissist, cocaine addict, and unscrupulous Wall Street alpha male who turns into a murderous psychopath in Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psyco, is highly caricatured and put on a seizure.
John Self, humorously portrayed in Martin Amis’s novel Money, is more balanced, capricious, consumerist, womanizer, and money-hungry. The self-destructive anti-hero indulges in all possible excesses: alcohol, pornography, prostitution, and the reader cannot avoid a certain disgust for a man where things are going extremely well, but who has a catalog of vices and shortcomings. values.
anti-human
While there are many novels where we find characters who are sullen or hate the rest of humanity, these are Graham Greene’s Dr. Few have been shown as transparently as in Fischer. Here, filthy rich Dr. Fischer has a sickly hobby of humiliating his fellow men. The millionaire is dedicated to throwing parties where his guests test their unscrupulousness, feed them (in exchange for material gifts) animal feed, or hide a bomb in exorbitant checks and cookies. He despises all his boyfriends and hates his fragile son-in-law, who is depressed after his wife’s death in a tragic ski accident.
Enfant, terrible and provocative are probably the most common adjectives to describe Michel Houellebecq. Islamophobic views and other controversial pearls aside, the characters in his novels are almost literally anti-literature. Nihilists, sex addicts, distasteful characters like Bruno in Elementary Particles or Michel in Plataforma. But in nearly all of his novels, beyond the provocation of his approach, like Surrender, in which an Islamist France was brought up, his characters do not seek our admiration and are a deformed and hopefully far worse version of ourselves and our own mediocrities. .
they are all disgusting
This is also the case in novels where no character is worthy of admiration. This is the case with Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. The book also features a yuppie, her boyfriend, an alcoholic journalist who longs for recognition, a pastor, and a district attorney. All of them act for their own interests and none of them survive the burning. A car accident awakens the worst in each of those involved.
To take a more recent example, Sally Rooney’s recent bestselling book Conversations Between Friends could serve as an example. The starting point of the two twenties who have become indispensable friends (and lovers) in the life of a successful couple who is already approaching their forties is a bit of a stretch. But the toxicity created in the emotional relationships between the four of them eventually leads to decreased empathy in all of them. Jealousy, psychological awareness, and artificial dialogue make the characters very angry—at least for the subscriber—and lose interest in the future of events in the book.
In short, the examples are innumerable and the shortcomings are endless (other creations by Alexander Portnoy and Philip Roth, or Trainspotting characters, among the most famous of them), and each will have its own collection, but obviously does not require a character to be Hannibal Lecter to arouse hostility in the reader? ? It could be a heartless yuppie, a loving dad, an unbridled erotomaniac, or a Little Red Hood mom.