Can this one really count? While the information presented in the works of Shakespeare is highly fictionalized, Henry Hotspur was certainly a real person, thus not “fictional”. I would say no character based directly on a real person depicted with fairly close correspondence to actual historical events would be allowable, e.g. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, or Richard III, or Henry V, or Robert Graves’ Claudius, etc. Some characters are less cut-and-dried like Macbeth, or Hamlet, or even possibly Hector, or Achilles (who might be based on real persons, but are depicted in a manner which is almost certainly wholly fictional). Characters like Dracula would be allowed however, since he is “inspired” at best by the person of Vlad the Impaler.
Agreement? Dissent?
I’ll further add (or second, third, or whatever, I don’t know numbers…)
Annie Wilkes
Jack Torrance
Randle Patrick McMurphy
Abel Magwitch
Ebenezer Scrooge
Elric of Melnibone
Conan the Cimmerian
Cthulhu
Abdul Alhazred
Wilfred of Ivanhoe
Queequeg
O’Brien
Hmph. Can’t believe there isn’t more Faulkner on this list. Well, here are my suggestions…
Quentin Compson, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, “That Evening Sun,” “A Justice,” etc.
The aforementioned Joe Christmas from Light in August
Candace “Caddy” Compson from all the same stuff as Quentin except for Absalom, Absalom!
Jewel Bundren, As I Lay Dying
Okay, next different authors…
Destiny
Death
Dream
Destruction
Desire
Despair
Delerium (all of them from The Sandman)
Satan from Paradise Lost
Marlowe
Kurtz (both from Heart of Darkness)
John Shade from Pale Fire
Philip Marlowe from all those books by that Chandler guy
Lucio from Measure for Measure
Volpone
Mosca (two from Volpone)
Sam Vimes, from many Discworld books
Granny Weatherwax, too, from Discworld
Uh, and some others…
I’d also like to add votes for Iago and Mowgli. I’m glad you guys thought of them.
A note to Pelopidas238 - there shouldn’t be any “beating to” a character. It’s by getting multiple votes that characters get on the list! So we should all feel free to list any character we like that other people have mentioned! A character won’t make the list if he, she or it is only mentioned once.
More that I remembered:
Scarlett O’Hara
Esteban Trueba, House of Spirits
Pilar and the American, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Uncle Julien, of the Mayfair Witch series
More that I remembered:
Scarlett O’Hara
Esteban Trueba, House of Spirits
Pilar and the American, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Uncle Julien, of the Mayfair Witch series
Characters that have inspired so many movies, TV shows, etc., that they have to be considered influential:
Tarzan
Jane
Sherlock Holmes
Dr. Watson
Dracula
Dr. Frankenstein
Frankenstein’s monster
Captain Nemo
Allan Quatermain
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Long John Silver
Griffin (The Invisible Man)
Robin Hood
Maid Marion
Friar Tuck
Little John
The Sheriff of Nottingham
King Arthur
Merlin
Lancelot
Guenevere
Bambi (yes, he was in a book first)
Pinocchio (ditto)
Dorothy Gale
The Wizard of Oz
The Wicked Witch of the West
Superman
Batman
Wonder Woman
Swamp Thing
Sam Spade
Hercule Poirot
Winnie the Pooh
Alice (in Wonderland)
and many characters from the pen of W. S.:
Romeo
Juliet
Falstaff
Hamlet
Macbeth
Lady Macbeth
King Lear
Puck (aka Robin Goodfellow)
A few of the names I have listed may or may not have been real people, but I believe that the fiction written about them has been more influential than anything the people themselves actually did.
I hope all of the above are known to most Dopers. I do have to admit that I do not know who some of the characters listed in this thread are.
Characters that Spoke- named that somehow didn’t get in my first post:
Don Quixote
Sancho Panza
Huckleberry Finn
Oliver Twist
Ebenezer Scrooge
Tom Sawyer
Ichabod Crane
Othello
[Quasimodo(sp?)] The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Cinderella
(I’ve dropped some characters that I think are important, but that I would not put in the top 100.)
Others I missed:
Fagin
Tiny Tim
Iago
The Headless Horseman (whether he was Bram Bones or not)
Rip Van Winkle
August Dupin (sp?) (Poe’s detective)
Ulysses (Homer’s character, not Joyce’s)
Paul Bunyon
James Bond
The Shadow (one of the sources from which Batman was born)
Doc Savage (one of the sources from which elements of the Superman stories came)
I pity you, Jurhael, for starting this thread, because tabulating the results is going to be a terrible job.
Hijack/
Just for the hell of it, I’m going to start a thread in GQ asking if shareware exists to help count such votes.
/Hijack
I want to add more to my list, stealing shamelessly from others here more clever than I. Consider the reapeats as seconds or thirds. I have not voted for any character twice, I think.
Hamlet
Oedipus
Tarzan
Jane
Atticus Finch
HAL
Doc Savage
Romeo
Juliet
Lady Chatterly
Edmond Dantes
Don Quixote
Sancho Panza
Oliver Twist
Hercules
Cinderella
Ignatius J. Reilly
Achilles
Bigger Thomas
Robin Hood
Phillip Marlowe
Falstaff
Hansel
Gretel
Jeckyll
Hyde
Aladdin
Bambi
The Wizard of Oz
The Wicked Witch of the West
Wonder Woman
Ichabod Crane
Fagin
My goal: to have the highest percentage of my choices represented in the top 100. It’s like an independent little contest within a contest that we all can play, but I of course will win.
Jurhael, I brought the first page into word, took out everything that wasn’t a nomination, (user names, quotes etc.) and then brought it into XL and alphabetized it. Email me and I’ll send it to you.
Dr. Faust
Peter Pan
Golem
Brer Rabbit
Jack (of beanstalk fame, plus many other Jack stories)
Scarlet Pimpernel, The
Zorro
Baron Munchausen
Santa Claus
Gulliver
Anna Karenina
Scarlett O’Hara
Woodrow Call
Augustus McCrae (Gus)
Bilbo Baggins
Amber St. Claire
Oliver Twist
Dracula
Robin Hood
King Arthur
Lancelot
Hazel-rah
Don Juan
Allow me to lobby a bit for the Black Knight from Ivanhoe. This is such an influential character that it has become a cliche, with references in everything from Monty Python to Batman to Hollywood Westerns. It would be a shame to leave the character off a “100 most important” list.
By the way, I’d tell you who the black knight really is, but that’d be a spoiler…
See that’s one of those fictionalized historical persons I was talking about earlier. Take a major historical figure, and make up a bunch of stuff about him. Is he a fictional character, now? For example, Mason Weems’ portrayal of the young George Washington, clearly fictional, but based on a real person. Where is the line?
Hmmmm…I would say that if it’s only based on and happens to share the same name, then it would count as fictional. If it’s the portrayal of the ACTUAL person(I guess like with Henry the 8th in historical stuff), then I would say that it doesn’t count.
Make sense? Because this line is blurry, I know…
Atticus Finch
Hellboy
Bruce Wayne/Batman
Clark Kent/Superman
Bilbo Baggins
Holden Caulfield
James Bond
Huckleberry Finn
Grendel (the original, not the comic book)
Dr. Frankenstein
Tarzan
Uncle Remus
Br’er Rabbit
But, I don’t see all that many people nominating real people, so I guess I shouldn’t worry. Ehehe
