But he’s likable.
Hell, while we’re on comics for a moment, howsabout Morpheus? I’d suggest he’s certainly cool as all git out, but he’s got 75 issues/ten trades chock full of not likable.
A Tale of Two Cities - Sydney Carton isn’t very likable, and whatshername (Lucy?) is too busy fainting for most of it to make much of an impression (gods! I couldn’t stand her!). Great book, but I don’t know if the characters are likeable.
Gordon Comstock in “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” by George Orwell. Spends most of the novel whining about how he has no money, but refuses to go back to his old job at an ad agency which paid really well. He claims he doesn’t want to go back because of his rebellion against depending on money (the “Money Gods”). Then quit whining about how you have none!
Samuel Jackson mentioned in an interview on The Daily Show that of all his roles, the character of Othello was the one he most personally disliked (I guess even more so than the stick-up guy who tries to rob the McDonnell’s in Coming To America). He just can’t relate to how some bad-ass warrior like Othello was made out to be would never actually confront either Desdemona or Cassio.
I was coming here to mention Mersault. I loathed that guy. And I was glad, glad do you hear me, when he was sentenced to death!
I’d also support the nominations of Thomas Covenant and Heathcliffe.
Of course, all these books (except the Thomas Covenant books) were forced upon me, not something I chose of my own free will. (And Covenenant I only read one and a half books about him before I got too fed up to continue.)
While I didn’t like the protagonist from Crime and Punishment I didn’t feel as much visceral disgust with him as I do for Mersault.
Aw, come on. I love Heathcliff! All this bashing from a bunch of people who insist on adding an “e” to the end of his name. Honestly.
Cathy, on the other hand, was indeed a spoiled, silly little bitch. It’s all her fault that Heathcliff becomes a flaming a-hole.
When I first read The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander, I was quite put off by the self-centered arrogance exhibited by Taren, the main character. This beginning made the whole theme of the Prydain books (the growth of Taran as a person) much more effective as it plays out over the series.
Nick, from The Great Gatsby. His self-rightous condecending apathy grates. And I love the book, for all that I think everyone is pathetic.
I came in here specifically to mention Thomas Covenant, but I see I’m too late by far. I made it through the first book, but gave up after that. Can’t much stomach a protagonist who’s a rapist.
I’d also like to nominate about every third person from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga cum cashcow. Since they’re pretty much all protagonists now.
I heard some commentary from Palahniuk about the character (at the end of the ‘Choke’ audio book) where he says that the character is so unlikable that that’s the reason he made him get sick (with impacted bowel) so that the reader would have sympathy for an otherwise unsympathetic character.
Palahniuk’s latest, Haunted, has a whole mess of extremely unlikable, vile people.
And the jacket describes the stories as “stomach-churning”, and boy, that’s no exaggeration. The one story (if you read it, you know which I’m talking about) was so vile it was the first time in my life I had trouble continuing to read something. I was kinda reading it through a squint, as idiotic as that sounds.
Add me to the Covenant bandwagon. What an ass.
I’d like to nominate Emma “Why didn’t you kill yourself 300 pages ago and end the readers’ misery” Bovary. I loathe Mme Bovary. The character and the book. I was forced to read it in my college Western Civ class. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we followed Mme B with Hedda Gabler. She’s another one. Took her waaaaay too long to dig out daddy’s pistols. Oh, and Mother Courage.
That was a rough semester.
Pretty much anything by William Faulkner, particularly all the protagonists of As I Lay Dying. I kept wishing they would all die. Buncha morons.
Anyone read Smilla’s Sense of Snow? I’m about halfway through and beginning to hope that Smilla falls off a glacier or something.
Yep…while I don’t like that little twit Lolita. However, we are seeing her through Humbert’s eye’s, and he is not really interested in letting us see the preditor in him or the innocence in Lola.
Emma Bovary has been mentioned. As has Cathy from Withering Heights and Thomas Convent, all who spring to my mind as unlikeable.
I find it interesting that Emma Bovary comes off as unlikeable, but I’ve always liked Anna Karinina, who has a similar storyline. Somehow, Bovary comes off as a selfish, bored bitch. Karinina comes off as “tragically star crossed.”
So, this kingdom…What is its annual GDP? What kind of natural resources does it have? Does it have a coastline?
Oh, and I came in here to say “Thomas Covenant”–I never even finished the first of those books–so now I got nothing.
I read it, and didn’t much care for Smilla, but I can’t say I hated her the way that I have the other characters I’ve nominated in this thread. Mind you - when the book ends and she’s more or less in a position that is likely to be fatal, I’m not upset about it.
The Corrections! What a bunch of self absorbed, soulless, manipulative creeps. I’ve tried very hard to forget the thing, but IIRC, the only character with a glimmer of human decency had senile demenia and hallucinated armies of wiggly shit.
Gah!
It’s arguable whether Hannibal Lecter was a protagonist in Red Dragon or Silence of the Lambs, but he was most certainly not likable in either of those. He killed completely innocent people, sometimes for no more reason than his own pleasure, but by the time of Hannibal, when he was unquestionably the protagonist, he’d become “more sinned against that sinning” and somehow redeemed (only eating evil people, etc.). Odd sell out.
I wonder how Behind the Mask (a prequel about his pre-captivity days) will treat him.
Two memoirs with unlikable characters (if only to me):
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius- I pity his loss of his parents at an early age and respect his becoming the guardian of his younger brother, but Eggers just comes across as an egotistical self-centered jerk in this book and other things I’ve read by him. He also has the “I’m cute and famous so I don’t really need to do further research to make my opinions valid” thing happening.
Palimpsest by Gore Vidal.
Vidal is one of the most brilliant essayists in American literature and at times a wickedly funny wit, but he has always come across to me as the most self-absorbed and compassionless snob and this (the closest thing he’s written to an autobiography) did nothing to alter that opinion. Perhaps it’s because of his horror of a mother (at least in his description of her), but as a novelist he never seemed to have a clue how to portray human emotions and had a tendency to paint one-dimensional rural people and or religious people. He just comes across in this book and his autobiographical essays as a detached and bitter old queen (though he’s never acknowledged he was gay- still claims he’s bisexual [except for the liking sex with women part]).