Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth is the main one that comes to mind for me. The narrator (Henry in the translation I’ve read, although I’ve also seen him called Harry and Axel) is a whiny little man-bitch who wails, “All is lost!” at least once every other page, until I wonder why Hans the eider-duck hunter doesn’t just drown him in a geyser.
Any others?
The idiot narrator in Memoirs of an Invisible Man. I tossed the book aside when he patiently watched the FBI setting a trap for him for about a half hour and then, when they were finally ready to spring it, realized he might want to escape. :rolleyes:
Sara Paretsky’s detective novels about V.I. Warshawski, who screws things up more often than not because she can’t control her temper.
Give the guy a break. He had just lived through some horrible and very bizarre explosion, which turned him invisible. How coherent would you be if you woke up invisible?
The trap is what snaps the narrator back into his right frame of mind, realizing he doesn’t want to be in the government’s hands for the rest of his life. It spurns him to escape.
I loved that book.
Humbert Humbert leaps to mind. I remember suggesting to one of my lit professors that if Nabokov wanted to write a story narrated by an ass, maybe a shorter form would have been more appropriate. Alas, Dr. Walters did not see the humor in that.
Well, compared to Ada, the narration is short and sympathetic 
Meant to Be by Edie Clare.
Not a great book, but a reasonable contemporary romance in that “genre” where the heroine discovers an inheritance from her long-lost family and sets out to find out more information. Along the way she falls in love and someone tries to kill her. I used to love books like this by a particular author whose name escapes me and it is driving me crazy.
Anyway, this book wasn’t as good as most of the ones by the author whose name I can’t remember, in part because of timing issues. It would have made a lot more sense for most of the main characters to be about 5 or 10 years older. And for the book have covered a span of time larger than a week.
But the timing issues only bothered me after I finished the book, and thought about why it wasn’t as good as some others like it I’ve read. What made me want to smack the narrator was scenes like the one in which she had baked a pie, and she offered a piece to the hero. He declined, and she was pissed because it was a “fabulous pie. The only kind of pie I make is fabulous pies.”
Maybe it bugged me because I’m a respectable cook and I don’t do pies. But I think it bugged me because she was so smug. She tells us she’s got a history of being a doormat, but I don’t believe it.
Of course, Victor Frankenstein and Alex DeLarge (A Clockwork Orange) come to mind.
Wuthering Heights. Lockwood was a dillweed.
Jack Dowell in Ford Madox Ford “The Good Soldier.” You just can’t rely on him.
I recently read The French Lieutenant’s Woman and spent the entire book wanting to set fire to the author/narrator.
Not that anyone cares–but the author I was thinking about is Phyllis Whitney.
Unless I’m misremembering the book, I love the part near the end where
The author himself shows up on the train and flips a coin to determine what’s going to happen to the characters next.
That cracked me up. Otherwise, I do remember thinking the narrator was kind of a tool.
The Red Badge of Courage - The main character has a name so stop calling him ‘the youth’, fuckstick!
Harvest Home.
I bought it based on a recommendation here for a scary book. I suppose it could have been scary if the main character and narrator wasn’t such a complete ass.
[spoiler]Example: he rapes a woman and his defense to his wife is “It wasn’t like that, she wanted it”.
W. T. F.?![/spoiler]
I loved “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt, but there were several points in the book where I wanted to shake the narrator by the shoulders and say “find some new friends you idiot! Why don’t you hang out with the California chick who wants to jump your bones instead of these classical studies freaks!”
In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I was put off by the narrator’s smug comments in the last chapter: “see how cleverly I chose my words? Didn’t see that coming didya?” Well, someone didn’t see Hercule Poirot coming either, now did they? Ha!
Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon. Barry is a total bastard with a preposterous ego. Which is rather the point of the story, actually. But it’s a fun read!
Moby Dick. I know that if someone is going to die he can’t tell the story in first person, but I would have liked to hear Ahab’s first hand account.
Yeah, I see where you’re coming from. Because, you see, I was that California chick.
Ahem, but seriously. I felt that way at times, but at the same time, his new friends were just so odd and out there that I could forgive the narrator his lapses in judgment.
As for my pick, I’ll nominate both “Prep” and “The Man of My Dreams” by Curtis Sittenfeld. More so “Prep” because I enjoyed it more, but I definitely found myself irritated by the narrator. She’s something of a cipher and you sort of want to like her because of where she’s coming from in relation to everyone else, but she’s just such a petty, awful person.
I always wondered about the opening passage where Ishmael talks about going to sea “when my hypos get the better of me.” They did IV drugs back then?!