“You're a Choir Boy Compared to Me!”: Protagonists Who Would Be Raging Bastards in Real Life

I came across this piece some weeks ago by Annie Cardi, weighing in on likeability.  The whole piece is worth a read, but for the time constrained, I'll sum it up.  Cardi believes readers miss out on meaningful experiences in literature when they gravitate only towards "likeable" or "relatable" characters.  As in politics, if readers encounter a character--particularly a protagonist--they wouldn't want to have a beer with, they'll dismiss the work.  So, she urges readers to look instead for characters that seem human, who express important facets of the human condition or challenge our worldview.  Remove "likeable" and "relatable" from your review vocabulary, she suggests.

Cardi, I think, is mostly right.  "Likeable" means too much to too many people; it puts too much stock on individual taste.   And anyone can point out the heap of stories that have been told by, and about, terrible assholes: your Patrick Batemans (American Pyscho), your Alexes (A Clockwork Orange).

Or this fella, from one of my very favorite films, which I won't talk about further here lest this post run about 10,000 words:

Seriously, I could go on and on about how much I love this damn crazy movie.

I see Cardi's point regarding "relatable"; it too is a relative term, relying on individual taste.  Still, I don't think we should dismiss relatability so quickly.  Or at the very least, consider that relatability tends to factor in what we can find human.

Massimo Carlotto's violent, pitch-black At the End of a Dull Day is narrated by its main character Giorgio Pellegrini.  Pellegrini is a former criminal, eleven years mostly-straight and running a luxurious restaurant in Veneto.  He is also a sadistic, heartless sociopath.  While Patrick Bateman shows these same tendencies, the surrealist tone of American Psycho makes him seem like a creature of pure fantasy.  A reader can only confront Alex of A Clockwork Orange on his own terms; he uses his own language, which mitigates his brutality.  The deadpan, very real world of At the End of a Dull Day is written to mirror present-day Italy, so that readers experience Pellegrini as a person who could exist in the flesh.

Pellegrini frames politicians, tortures his wife, sexually humiliates his business partner, makes thousands of Euro in human trafficking, and shoots multiple people in cold blood.  He is the most terrible person I've ever encountered in a book, and I spent about 300 pages cheering for him.

Carlotto made Pellegrini awful, but he writes him in a mode of constant self-preservation.  He wants his restaurant, he wants his money, he wants his submissive wife.  He is in complete control of his life, and he wants to keep it that way, despite the constant threats to his autonomy.  The need for control over our lives, our futures, and our dignity is a universal human trait.  The fear of losing control--or the despair when you believe you've already lost it--is familiar.

Feel all the disgust you want when you read how Pellegrini sells off prostitutes to another gangster who will commit certain atrocities on them--and you will absolutely feel some disgust.  But you'll still feel his terror of losing everything all the same.  

Francisco de Goya, "Saturn Devouring His Son"

(There's room for a whole blog post on why Italians do noir so well, but that's for another time).

It's a tremendous risk to create such a vicious character, but Carlotto makes it work.  I gotta give him a lot of credit for that.

My only beef--and this is just my own opinion--is that you so rarely see women characters like this.  Too many writers seem to feel a stronger obligation to make female characters "likeable"; as in, "moral".  If a woman does have to break a law, it's usually from hunger or for the sake of a (most of the time, male) relative; not because the woman is a straight-up bad person.  Maybe that's one of the reasons I love crime fiction; it's more likely to feature amoral women who cause trouble out of pure selfishness and ambition, without apology.

She's catastrophically incompetent as a ruler, but Cersei Lannister is still one of G.R.R. Martin's best characters.

And I can't neglect, there's a lot of pull from the wish-fulfillment parts of all our hearts that makes it much easier to accept antiheroes.  If you say you've never fantasized about living by your own moral code, in complete selfishness, you're a damned liar.

So I still think "relatability" is important for characters.  But maybe I'm really just harping on Cardi's semantics.  When she dismisses "relatability", she means the term in the sense politicians do; readers or critics who fixate on "relatability" tend to use it interchangeably with "likeability."  Instead, I see it as a device to make readers/audiences invested in the story.  Storytelling works because the reader cares what happens to the characters; if the reader doesn't understand the character, why should they care about the story?

What Patrick Wharburton says in "The Woman Chaser" about movies applies to books, too: "The average moviegoer has a tendency to identify himself with the lead character, to project himself into the story and actually live the story with the thoughts, emotions, and actions of the lead character".  It helps if you give him/her something to latch on to.


Caveat: Of course, there are other characters who seem neither relatable nor human.  And we still can't look away from them.

But, I guess the vagarities of charisma better be left for another post.