We Wouldn't Be Friends

The first week of Story Euphoria looked at how stories slip us into the skins of others, including people we might not like very much. There’s a certain breed of character with whom, realistically, it’s hard to identify, and yet writers get us to sympathize with them anyway, sometimes against our will. In fact, writing from the point of view of an unlikeable character has been a popular ruse since the birth of modern literature and one does not need to cast far to find examples.

Even in the pre-dawn of modern literature we can find examples, with characters like the overly-ambitious Faust, willing to sell his soul for knowledge and power, or Shakespeare’s complex and tragic Othello who, when tricked into believing his wife adulterous, murders her. As the novel matured as a literary form, more contemporary types emerged, like Dostoyevsky’s young and impoverished protagonist, Raskolnikov, who early in the novel, Crime and Punishment, murders an old woman, which deed becomes the catalyst for the rest of the book. A more lighthearted example could be Emma, from Jane Austen’s novel of the same name, who is about as self-satisfied and self-interested as young ladies come, and hardly a good friend—until she matures. Notably, Emma is a character who, as Austen herself put it, "no-one but myself will much like,” and a great deal of our entertainment comes from watching Emma get her comeuppance.

But not all authors are so obliging. While many unlikeable characters do transform during the course of the story in some way that makes us more inclined to sympathize, there are plenty of others who remain ambiguous, or whose crimes are so distasteful that little could ever be done to exonerate them. An excellent example might be Humbert Humbert, the pedophiliac and murderous narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. For some readers, this is enough to make them give up on a book, but others are more easily swayed by the author’s plot devices or pretty narrative, and indeed, in Nabokov’s hands, Humbert’s tale is full of hypnotic poetry—as he jokingly admits in the first page, “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Indeed, what makes us put up with these despicable people with whom, if they weren’t confined to fiction, we probably wouldn’t be friends? Is beautiful execution and brilliant authorship alone to blame? One theory is that such characters make us feel superior, and an opposite theory is that we feel secretly relieved that we are not alone with the darkness inside us. But I’m not sure I buy those explanations. When I find myself in the shoes of an unlikeable character I am most captured by the sheer variety of the human spectrum. It is a psychological fascination. Watching such characters may be akin to watching a dissection—gruesome, fascinating and revealing.