Last night my wife told me about the book she was reading, a gothic novel in which the protagonist is just dumb as hell. The problem, she said, is that the author thinks it’s a smart protagonist, and it’s infuriating.
I love me a book with a smart protagonist, who wends their way skillfully through the novel’s twists and turns and puzzles. I hate me a book where the author tries to write a smart protagonist, but the protagonist is a dumbass.
But what about books where the protagonist is just not very bright, and it’s not played for laughs?
The only one I can think of (just thought of as I started typing this) is The Daughter’s War, a military fantasy that turned out to be one of my favorite books of the year. The first-person novel is written simply and directly in the voice of a soldier who has many great qualities, but they don’t include a crafty, devious mind.
How do y’all feel about dim protagonists? Are there other good examples?
The Fallible Fiend by L. Sprague de Camp perhaps counts (not sure if it qualifies as “comedic” or not). The demonic protagonist is explicitly not that smart and highly literal minded; it’s theorized that demons simply don’t need to evolve human level intelligence since they can lean on their physical superiority.
The movie character Forrest Gump springs to mind, but I haven’t read the book that the movie is based on, so I don’t know whether that would count or not.
In The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray, Clyde Newcome is a good-looking, likeable young man who is academically unsuccessful and who ends up as an unsuccessful artist.
Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy isn’t really dumb, but he’s not some clever protagonist either. He just kind of goes along for the ride.
While he’s not specifically played for laughs, the entire book is, so maybe this doesn’t fit.
Another maybe fits, maybe doesn’t entry: Chauncey Gardiner in Being There. He isn’t played for laughs, but his narrative purpose is to mock everyone else.
It maybe doesn’t quite fit, but Hastings out-Watsons Watson when it comes to Poirot: putting a book’s worth of first-person narration out there while trying to solve a mystery like he’s the protagonist in a detective novel, only to keep reaching incorrect conclusions in front of the brilliant sleuth who then patiently explains stuff to him. (And, like I kind of glossed over there, he doesn’t even get to supply something like medical-insight exposition so the great man can then extrapolate a clever deduction from it; he just, y’know, makes some mistakes while trying to figure things out.)