Quick!—think of a novel, movie, or play with an unsympathetic main character. It’s not easy, is it? There aren’t many stories that fall into that category. Why? I think humans are hard-wired to identify with characters, and it’s difficult to bond with a protagonist who is fundamentally unlikeable or evil. We have a fascination with evil, which is what makes villains such interesting folks, but as protagonists, villains or unsympathetic characters don’t work very well.
One example:
Even among fans of Charles Dickens, very few have ever read Barnaby Rudge.
I’m having difficulty finding other examples, because authors are smart enough to realize that unsympathetic main characters aren’t very popular. One of the great things about stories is that they allow us to empathize with another person’s struggles. Empathy is not only a fundamental human trait, it is also a pleasure. When a writer denies a reader that enjoyment, the reader feels thwarted and even neglected.
I suppose one could argue that Rodion Raskolnikov of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is an unsympathetic main character. Raskolnikov commits a cruel and unpardonable crime. But Raskolnikov feels great anguish for his sins. He ultimately repents and finds a spiritual love with Sonya. By the novel’s end, Raskolnikov’s suffering and change of heart have earned him some of the reader’s sympathy. The same is true of Dickens’ miser Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.
But there are certain types of unsympathetic main characters who do manage to evoke a positive response in a reader or audience. Among male characters, a domineering patriarch can sometimes be sympathetic if that person has overcome great obstacles or worked toward admirable goals. In August Wilson’s play Fences, for instance, the main character Troy, a garbage collector, is a cold and judgmental father. He’s also an unfaithful husband who fathers a child out of wedlock, despite having a devoted wife. But Troy is partly sympathetic because he’s suffered racial discrimination, and because we admire his determination to advance from garbage collector to the first Black truck driver working for the city.
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| Barbara Stanwick’s most famous femme fatale role |
A femme fatale often acts in amoral and vicious ways, but a moviegoer has to admire her beauty, her sensuality, and her scheming cleverness. If we never completely like the femme fatale, we still identify with her ability to live a kind of freedom that few achieve, male or female.
All in all, I would not recommend building a plot with an unsympathetic main character. If you do head down that curvy and cobblestoned street, I would suggest placing some very sympathetic characters along the way, in order to feed that terribly human impulse to identify.
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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
