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Unlikable Characters, Revisited: Unlikable Vs Unawesome

Keyan made some good points about my post on unlikeable characters from a couple of weeks ago, so I wanted to revisit the issue, and clarify some things.

First: I don’t buy Baush’s assertion that you’re a “bad reader” if you can’t stand unlikeable characters. I don’t buy the notion that there is such a thing as bad readers, period. There are readers that you appeal to, and readers that you don’t, and that’s really the only sweeping generalization you can make.

Second: the idea that main characters should be likable is not “rigorously stupid”. It’s an idea I disagree with, but that’s about as far as it goes.

Third: As Keyan says, if you’re going to make your main character unlikable, he’d better be supported and surrounded by a lot of awesomeness to make up for it. People want to like the people they’re spending time with, and if you’re going to deny them that, it should be for a good reason, and there ought to be consolation prizes.

I do think, however, that one of those prizes can be the mechanisms of your main character’s unlikability. It all depends on how you execute it. Milton’s Devil in Paradise Lost, for example, is generally acknowledged to be one of the greatest characters in history. Needless to say, there’s not much to “like” about incarnations of evil — but they can still be awesome, in the hands of a writer who knows what he’s doing, and whose imagination is completely engaged in their faults and foibles.

Which begs the question: what does “likable” mean, exactly? Is it someone who meets all the accepted societal standards of likability, or is it someone you enjoy reading about, regardless of their faults — who really gets to you at a fundamental level?

Which brings us, I think, to the real problem here, the one that Bausch refers to in passing — the danger that editors will assume that people won’t read stories with unlikable main characters, and so keep a lot of great stuff from getting out there. Likability is a very mushy and inaccurate standard, but it’s also extremely limiting. There are only a few ways to be likable, in the general sense. But there are lots of ways to be awesome.

So that’s the thing you should avoid, I guess. Unawesome characters.

Anyway.

I’ve heard it argued that the problem with Milton’s Devil was that he made Satan too easy to empathize with. I think that would be my definition of likable.

Bausch seems to imply that a reader should go along with the character, if the character is written well enough, to identify with what he or she wants. That’s not enough for me. It’s not enough that the character come alive, be knowable. I have to want to know that character to wish to read a book. (Assuming that the character is the main event, rather than the cool idea, the style, the plot, or the setting – all of which can be more important. For instance, I don’t read Ulysses because I love Stephen Dedalus, I read it because of the awesome execution of a neat idea.)

This is a great discussion – thanks for starting it.

Urp. That was not the best-written message.