The Problem of the Unsympathetic Main Character

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.

This novel includes some of Dickens’ most lyrical writing and a fascinating historical setting, but it’s never been a favorite. I think part of the reason is that the main character, Barnaby, fights with deadly fierceness on the wrong side of a cause. Bad actors manipulate Barnaby to take a leading role in the anti-Catholic riots in London in 1780. Although Barnaby is sympathetic because he is developmentally delayed, he ultimately has a negative impact. His story hasn’t won many readers.

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 fighting for his dignity. Troy has suffered racial discrimination, and we admire his determination to advance out of the role of garbage collector to become the first Black truck driver working for the city.

 

Another somewhat sympathetic dominating male is The General in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. The General is an impossibly violent and corrupt dictator, but the reader has to admire the stubborn strength he shows in defying neocolonial domination. Perhaps the exaggerated proportions of the crimes The General commits allow the reader to overlook some of the faults of this strange protagonist.

 

Among female characters, one type of unsympathetic character who manages to win over the audience is the femme fatale.

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 book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

The Influence of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

I just finished listening to the audiobook of William Faulkner’s celebrated novel Absalom, Absalom! The book has had a major influence on world literature, but, ironically, not always in Faulkner’s home country, the U.S.A.

William Faulkner

In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner creates a complex plot structure that is one of the novel’s most unusual features. That meandering architecture does have its antecedents—Ford Madox Ford’s groundbreaking work of fiction The Good Soldier springs to mind.

The tales of the various narrators in Absalom, Absalom! are filtered through the voice of Quentin Compson, a Harvard undergraduate from the rural Mississippi town of Jefferson, where most of the book’s action takes place. Quentin tells the story in 1910 to his roommate, Shreve, though the timeframe of the story is mostly mid-19^th century.

But the plot is not a linear progression through history. Instead, the story unfolds in temporal loops that keep circling back to certain key events, revealing with each telling another part of what occurred in a particular episode. As the loops around a certain incident accumulate, the reader is able to assemble a more complete picture of that event. These loops are like the twists of a cord, or the frills at the edge of a doily, moving forward, but never in a straight line.

At one point in the novel, Faulker beautifully describes the worldview that underlies his highly original method of storytelling:

“Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm …”

In other words, each event in a story resonates with every other event, whether we realize the connections or not, just as the characters in the novel seem to repeat the same actions from generation to generation. Thomas Sutpen, the Southern, self-made partriarch who is the dominant figure in the novel, marries two women without divorcing the first. The son that he never acknowledged from his first marriage similarly attempts bigamy, but … well, I won’t reveal what happens for those who haven’t read the novel. It’s like a cycle of Greek tragedies on a Southern plantation, and then some.

Absalom, Absalom! has been described as “Southern Gothic” but I don’t think there’s a lot of the Gothic in Faulkner’s book. To me, “Gothic” implies the presence of otherworldly beings and phenomena, and the characters of Absalom, Absalom! are very much of this world. What could be more material than Thomas Sutpen’s relentless, Balzacian energy to procreate and to build and rebuild his plantation? I would describe Faulkner’s novel as Southern baroque, since it has the ornateness, grandeur, and sensuality of a baroque basilica.

The style of the novel also has a leisurely, baroque flow. Here’s a passage from the opening paragraphs that gives a flavor of the book’s style, which makes it such a pleasure to hear certain sections of the novel read out loud in a Mississippi drawl:

“Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and oversweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house.”

OK, there are some weird otherworldly beings there. You’ve got to take a long leap of faith to read this book.

The novel’s baroque diction and plot were a tremendous influence on several of the greatest South American magical realist writers, particularly in novels such as GabrielGarcía Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Autumn of the Patriarch. I would add Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral (which you should read if you haven’t—fantastic book!), and Manuel Puig’s wonderful saga, Heartbreak Tango.

It’s curious to me that so few writers of Faulkner’s own country have emulated either his style or his plot structure. He is one of the few North Americans to win the Nobel Prize for literature, isn’t he? I do think Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz has some of Absalom, Absalom in its winding plot structure and the ornateness of its language.

Maybe part of the problem is that Faulkner is a complicated case when it comes to race and gender, and who wants to touch complexity in this day and age? Faulkner probably thought of himself as an enlightened person when it came to those issues, at least in the context of the time when Absalom, Absalom! was published, which was 1936. And in some ways Faulkner was enlightened. There is a character in the novel who nails himself into his own attic and starves to death rather than be drafted into the Confederate army during the Civil War. The book discusses relationships between the races. Those were certainly taboo subjects for a White Southern writer to depict at that time. Despite those moments in the book, Faulkner could be faulted over and over for his obsessive use of the “n” word and his stereotypical description of African Americans. The women characters in the novel are paper dolls. For those of us still living with the legacy of the history Faulkner describes in Absalom, Absalom!, the book is a grab bag as a role model for other writers.

Or is it that Faulkner’s baroque, Southern sensibility is not in tune with the WYSIWIG culture of Puritan America? Who has time for a sentence that goes on for the better part of a page in a world where stock market trades are logged by the millionth of a second? I experienced this firsthand when I was listening to the audiobook of Absalom, Absalom! on the way to work. I would arrive at the parking lot at my office and I couldn’t shut off the narrative till the actor reading the book came to a stopping point, so I would sit in my car for a couple of minutes while the time ticked away making me later and later for work, and I paused in my ancient Toyota Corolla listening to Faulkner’s sazerac-infused prose, waiting for that beautiful, winding river of a sentence to finally reach its delta.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone? Part 4, Love in the Time of Cholera

I spoke in previous blogs about listening to what your own writing wants. Sometimes this involves fictional characters who have personalities and fates separate from what we might want them to have. A writer has to set his or her characters free so they can determine their own fates. This might sound odd, but let me give you an actual example.

When the Nobel laureate novelist Gabriel García Márquez was writing one of his masterpieces, Love in the Time of Cholera, he had a certain idea of what he wanted the family of the main female character, Fermina Daza, to look like. Here’s what García Márquez said in an interview about how he wrote this part of the novel:

“One of the characters was Fermina, an eighteen-year-old girl living in a Caribbean town in the late nineteenth century. She lived with her father, a Spanish immigrant, and with her mother, who I could not figure out. And there was her aunt, her father’s sister, who I saw very clearly and who had the same name. I just could not grasp the mother. I would seat them around the table and I could see how they all behaved—except for the mother. At first I thought the aunt was in the way. And I took her out and put her back again. But the mother was the problem. I could not see her, not the face, the name or anything about her. And then one day I woke up and realized what had happened. The mother had died while the girl was still young. And when I saw that the mother was dead, she became alive and real. She grew and had a great presence—in the house, in everyone’s memory. It made me so happy to resolve this. I had been stretching the logic of the book. I had been trying to put a dead person among the living, and that was not possible.”

I find it fascinating that a writer as masterful as García Márquez, talking about one of his best works, describes his writing process almost as if he is a spectator to the lives of his characters. His main role as he recounts it is to record what the characters are saying and doing. It is his job to determine what is authentic to the story and the characters, not to make the story come out the way he wants. He has to hold true to what he calls “the logic of the book.” This is where I feel the presence of the muse, because there must be some power that determined that Fermina’s mother had to exit the book as a living character. 
Maybe the muse is another name for what García Márquez calls the “logic of the book.” Even to García Márquez, it did not seem as if he was making this edit himself. It’s amazing that he trusted the creative process so much that he could give his characters the freedom to develop that much on their own. When he discovered what the book wanted, rather than what he wanted for it, García Márquez had what he called in the same interview “one of the most curious and enjoyable literary experiences” he ever had. I think when we are writing at our best, this is how the experience feels to us, as if the muse is powering the writing, and we are the vehicle for her work.

In my next blog on the muse, I'll talk about voices in the writer's head, what they are, and when to listen to them. 

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone? Part 3, Allow Your Writing a Life of Its Own

“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention…”

I still get a few shivers when I read that cry for a muse at the very beginning of Shakespeare’s play Henry V. “A Muse of Fire”—I love it! That’s the opposite of cliché language, to take the muses, spirits of the water, and turn them into flame.

But I’m not suggesting that you begin your works with an address to the muse. That is the very last thing I would ever suggest.

What’s most interesting to me about the ancient concept of the muse is that it seems like a fairly accurate description of the creative process when it reaches a certain speed or intensity—in other words, when it works best. When we are writing at our most inspired, it does feel as if the work is flowing from a spring beyond our personal consciousness. Even if we are writing about our most intimate memories or hopes, a moment can occur where we feel as if we are taking dictation, or as if the work is pouring through us, rather than from us.

This reminds me of that famous moment in literary history when the poet Rainer Maria Rilke was walking by himself on the ramparts of Duino Castle by the Adriatic Sea, at the very edge of the European landmass and at the extreme moment of his personal despair. Rilke looked at the waves dynamiting against the rocks and the bunched-up storm and heard the first words of the Duino Elegies come to him as if out of a dark cloud: “Even if I cried out loud, who would hear me in the ranks of the angels?” It’s a strange and fascinating question: why does he need the angels to hear him? That kind of line in Rilke’s poetry is so intriguing and maddening. It’s what makes me come back to his work over and over.

What does this mean for us as writers, that we seem to reach our greatest personal triumphs when we are least personally in control of our writing? It’s a humbling truth, one that should keep us from getting too swell-headed about our work. But beyond that, can we use the idea of the muse, or of an external inspiration, in practice? Can this idea help us as writers and as critical editors of our own creations?

To try to persuade you why this is important, I’m going to approach this subject by means of a metaphor: the parent and the child. There is a sense in which we are the parents of our writing, not its owners, any more than a father or a mother owns a child. Parents always want certain things for their children—those wishes may be a father or mother’s deepest hopes, in fact. But parents who insist on their children being just like them or parents who demand that their kids fulfill their frustrated dreams are missing one of the great mysteries of parenting. The greater challenge, for the parent and for the writer, is to witness the child or the work forming itself on its own, so closely related to the parent, but independent and with its own hopes and desires and weaknesses. Similarly, when we see our own writing most clearly is when we are no longer thinking of what we want for the work. We begin to think of what is best for the work. We start to let our writing tell us what it wants us to do for it, not what we want for it.

In my next blog I’ll discuss how this need for the work to exist on its own played out in the writing of one of my favorite novels, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Other recent posts about writing topics:Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer