Unlikable Characters Return with a Vengeance

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In 2017, I wrote a post about novels with unlikable characters and how we might still like those novels – or maybe not. 

I noted nine years ago that “we hope the story line is compelling enough and the writing impressive enough to make up for the absence of congenial characters.” Humor can help, too.

The five books I cited in that post were mostly readable despite the downer characters – and perhaps partly because of them. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog, Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

Today, I’m going to use this same theme to discuss five more novels – all of which I’ve read or reread since 2017 — starting with the 2012 bestseller Gone Girl that I finally got to last week.

Gillian Flynn’s two protagonists – Amy and Nick – were so off-putting that I almost stopped reading after a few dozen pages. Both were what we would’ve called “yuppies” back in the day: young urban professionals a little too spoiled and a little too full of themselves. 

But I soldiered on, and Gone Girl became quite original and riveting in a very twisted way before going off the rails (in my opinion) toward the end. 

As with many other books featuring unlikable protagonists, it helps when you have supporting characters who are at least somewhat appealing. Gives a reader a person or two to latch onto. In Gone Girl, Nick’s twin sister Margo is mostly likable — even as several other supporting characters (such as Nick’s hateful aged father and the obsessed-with-Amy/passive-aggressive Desi) are loathsome. 

Fifty years earlier, we had Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle in which virtually every character is unpleasant or greedy or weird or antisocial. That was Jackson’s intent, and she was very good at that in this and her other best-known works. But one does feel some sympathy and sorrow for certain characters, and I think that was the author’s intent, too.

Most of the major players in Hilary Mantel’s historical novel Wolf Hall (2009) are far from lovable. When there’s royalty and “court intrigue,” you’re going to get a lot calculating, ruthlessness, sucking up, etc.

Agatha Christie’s ingeniously plotted 1939 mystery And Then There Were None features a cast in which every featured character is guilty in some way. Still, we can empathize with their ordeal after they’re invited to gather together by a person with murder on the mind.

A decade later, Daphne du Maurier’s The Parasites was published. I included that 1949 novel in a post last month about entertainers in fiction, and the pampered/irresponsible show-biz family (father, mother, daughter, son) in du Maurier’s book is certainly not one you’d want on your holiday card list. The non-show-biz other daughter is a little more sympathetic in a self-sacrificing way, but does not elicit much respect.   

Comments about, and examples of, this theme?

Misty the cat says: “One more space to add to my classic car collection!”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – which includes topics such as Spain’s World Cup-winning team staying at a hotel in my town — is here.

30 thoughts on “Unlikable Characters Return with a Vengeance”

  2. Dave, another fascinating topic and follow-up discussions. It occurs to me that it must take a very special kind of writer to spend years living with unpleasant characters through the writing, rewriting, and editing of a novel. There has to be a compelling reason for creating them.

    Books allow us to encounter difficult personalities from the safety of the page. We watch how they think, how they relate to others, and the consequences of their choices. Whether it’s Heathcliff, Ebenezer Scrooge, or King Lear, we don’t necessarily admire them, but we come away understanding something deeper about revenge, redemption, pride, and the human condition. We don’t always have to like the characters, but we do hope to understand them a little better. Those insights can help us better understand some of the people we meet in our own lives.

    I’ve encountered more difficult personalities in my non-fiction reading than in fiction. Real life often reminds us that human nature is complex and sometimes there is no happy ending, no redemption. Do you remember this quote from To Kill a Mockingbird: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

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  4. Oh, what an interesting topic, Dave! Gone Girl sounds intriguing. I remember reading The Wasp Factory Iain Banks at school when I found it in the library. It was the first book I’d read with an unlikeable main character; I’ll admit, it scared me a bit!

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  5. Hi Dave, disagreeable characters feature in many books but I can’t think of one where all the main characters were horrible. Miss Havisham from Great Expectations was definitely a horrible character, as was Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. She from the book by Rider Haggard. Mr Plod from noddy 🤣

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    • Thank you, Robbie, for those various great examples! “Great Expectations,” “Wuthering Heights,” and “She” had some at least semi-likable characters in their casts, but Miss Havisham, Heathcliff, and Ayesha (She) were definitely not likable at all — even if one could partly understand what made them what they were.

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  6. Really unlikable characters can taint a book in memory. I remember Gone Girl with distaste. Donna Tartt’s characters are also pretty much unlikable, despite her sometimes wonderful writing. I found The Secret History intriguing, but didn’t like any of the characters.

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    • Thank you, Audrey! Distasteful is a great way to describe “Gone Girl,” although I did find it compelling for a while before things got absolutely nuts and I felt like the characters were author constructs rather than believable people.

      You’re right about Donna Tartt; even her “The Little Friend” and “The Goldfinch” (both of which I liked better than “The Secret History” and I loved “The Goldfinch”) don’t have much in the way of likable characters.

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  7. I confess to a childish need for someone to care about and identify with in any fiction book I read. The person can start out unpleasant, as long as their personality and character improve throughout the book, but I need that to happen. For example, I like Austen’s Emma (although not as much as Persuasion) because I think Emma is a somewhat more thoughtful, less manipulative woman by the end of the book. (Thanks to Linda Lyndhurst for bringing her up.) But I thought Gone Girl was awful–I’m not sure why I finished reading it. However, I thought Wolf Hall was a wonderful book and found Thomas Cromwell a very sympathetic character, despite his having to change masters as Wolsey falls out of favor with the king. Perhaps Cromwell’s character deteriorates in the second and third books, but I found a lot to admire in him in Wolf Hall.

    Nick Hornby’s About a Boy is a novel I’m very fond of, even though one of the two main male characters, Will, starts out as a jerk. But watching him become a nicer person is one of the pleasures of the book!

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    • Thank you, Kim! I hear you — having characters (even if “only” supporting ones) to like usually makes for a much better reading experience. Emma Woodhouse definitely became a least somewhat nicer by the end of the Austen novel (always good to see that happen with a character), even as Anne Elliot was appealing from first page to last in “Persuasion.” Thomas Cromwell was probably the most likable major character in “Wolf Hall,” though I probably had more mixed feelings about him than you did. Still, “he had to do what he had to do” to get ahead and stay ahead as a non-royal person in a fraught time and place.

      “Gone Girl” is a VERY strange novel.

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  8. So interesting! I’ve never read “Gone Girl”, but I remember how I felt about the film, directed by David Fincher, I think? I wanted to like it (love Rosamund Pike), but the whole experience of watching freaked me out. I think I blocked out the “why”, LOL. But you’ve got my attention with your description of Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”. A boatload of nutty characters? I’m intrigued! Thanks, as always, for your fabulous Sunday posts. 😊💝😊

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  9. Great post.

    Your observation about the need for a compelling plot or an engaging secondary character to balance out unlikable protagonists is spot on.

    It reminds me of Don Rodrigo, the character from Alessandro Manzoni’s 1827 masterpiece, The Betrothed, a novel I’ve often mentioned and which for generations was required reading in all Italian high schools.

    Don Rodrigo is an arrogant and detestable tyrant who upends the lives of innocent peasants out of pure malice and a stupid bet.

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    • Thank you, Luisa! Glad you mentioned “The Betrothed” again! I looked for it during my last library visit; it wasn’t there, but I hope for better luck in the future. Don Rodrigo sounds awful. 😦 (Unlike singer Olivia Rodrigo. 🙂 )

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  10. I’ve only read ‘ Therese Raquin’ of all the books you name above, Dave, and that only because I was getting a bit in-depth with Zola for an essay I was writing on him; otherwise I’d probably never have read it, as the synopsis of it and the others put me off before I’d even opened the cover. I suppose a good example is Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’, of whom the author stated ‘I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.’ I came around to her when she learned what a pain she was, and as Mr Knightley was okay with her that was good enough for me – plus Mrs Elton outdoes Emma in every dislikeable way, along with her smug husband, and neither of them redeems themselves. I remember reading ‘Madame Bovary’ in the summer before I was to study it, and was confused because I didn’t like Emma Bovary (is it me and characters called Emma?) at all. She was the eponymous protagonist; surely I was supposed to like her? When I got onto the course – on Literary Realism – I realised that it was all about the absence of the author, who usually subtly manipulates readers to like or dislike as he/she wishes; hence it was up to readers to make up their own minds, and in my case it was a thumbs-down for Mme B. Elsewhere there’s Mrs Bennett, and Mr Collins, and Mr Dashwood’s family of his first marriage, not to mention Heathcliffe, and Jane Eyre’s a bit of a prig … there are just too many to go into here! For myself I recently created a highly-unlikeable character in ‘Fatal’ – but that’s enough about that. Many thanks for your weekly brain-teaser, Dave; have a good week. 🙂

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    • Thank you, Laura! The “Therese Raquin” potboiler is definitely a lesser, early Zola novel, but it has the distinction of being his first success.

      Yes, the title characters in “Emma” and “Madame Bovary” are not particularly likable, and that can be a surprise in a way until literature lovers think that through a bit. I found Emma Woodhouse very annoying, but she does show some maturity by the end of the novel.

      I appreciate the other mentions, too! Jane Eyre is indeed a bit of a prig, but overall admirable and mostly likable, I think.

      Have a good week, too!

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  11. I think I’ve mentioned J.P. Dunleavy’s horrid main character in The Ginger Man. 🤢 The other unlikable main character that springs to mind is Luke Carr in Thomas Williams’s The Followed Man. The main character in Williams’s The Hair of Harold Roux was also unlikable. Both characters were sexist, misogynist pigs.

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  12. Thank you so much, my dear author, When I opened Gone Girl, I could not stop smiling with the first phase: “When I think of my wife, I always think of the back of her head.” Thank you for it!

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