Unconventional Characters

Just like me, I’m sure you’re over the perfect main characters of movies and books. They represent who we want to be, not who we really are. Main characters of media serve to be relatable – someone that the reader can see a part of themselves in and desires to be and therefore falls in love with. They can sometimes be emotional, but they are always pure, brave, heroic, intelligent and they just have something that we do not (for instance, Triss is divergent, Katniss can shoot perfectly with a bow and arrow, Bella was born to be a vampire).

However, here and there, an avid reader gets a taste of imperfect main characters. So imperfect that they display the real truth of humanity: our flaws, sins and impulsivity. I believe that this is the direction that writing is going to continue in: embracing and displaying universal truths and rejecting picture-perfect scenarios for readers.

It can be frustrating to watch the character you are supposed to relate to and root for make the “wrong” decisions or decisions that you would not go for. It’s frustrating to watch them move into an obviously haunted house, ignoring all the signs. It’s frustrating to watch them trip over a tree root as they are running away from a serial killer in the woods. But, it’s necessary.

The Girl On The Train – Paula Hawkins

The Girl On The Train notoriously features an incredibly flawed female lead. Rachel, an unemployed alcoholic who is weak, self-pitying, somewhat attention-seeking and overly emotional. Her life is turned upside down when she becomes too drunk to recall any details about encounters with some of the people involved in the disappearance of a girl on the night that she disappears. Because of this, Rachel finds herself grasping at fragments of her memory that come back to her every now and then to try and piece together the story before it’s too late.

Rachel is clearly a very frustrating character because we like to think we aren’t anything like her and feel the urge to scold her for her terrible decisions. The truth is – we are Rachel. Rachel is human with flaws and (albeit very intense and uncontrollable) emotions. There are aspects of Rachel’s character build and decision-making that can be found within ourselves – the hunger to uncover the truth, the unhealthy ways we deal with our problems and volatile feelings, the tiny lies we tell that can end up blowing up in our faces. Rachel’s story reminds us that in the end – she is our hero. She is imperfect but she did save the day. Although her journey was difficult and chaotic, she prevailed through her good intentions and trust of her own intuition. She could be a hero, so so could you.

Comfort Of Strangers – Ian McEwan

Mary and Colin are an English couple who are on holiday in an unnamed city. They are incredibly weird and annoying and they have a strange dynamic. Their flaws lead to them meeting an even stranger man and his wife and uncovering the truth behind their stranger still love life, and finally they are kidnapped. And I think it’s all their fault.

Mary (and Colin) is just downright complicit. She displays a non-chalant, dismissive attitude. This can be seen as when she wakes up next to Colin in a stranger’s house without memory of how she got there and without her clothes. Instead of freaking out like a normal human being, she decides to “set about her yoga exercises.” She doesn’t check on Colin, instead allowing him to sleep and she does not even get dressed or attempt to discover where she is. Even her conversation with Colin when he wakes up is completely uncaring and devoid of any real, valid reaction towards her situation:

“Still dazed, he looked from her empty bed to the pattern on the wall, to Mary on the floor. ‘Where are we then?’ Mary lay on her back. ‘I’m not sure exactly.’”

This is just so incredibly frustrating. The reader wants to scream at them, “do something!” And as the story goes on, Mary fails to figure out that her and Colin were stalked by their abductor, despite obvious signs. This leads to their downfall because by the time Mary bothers to think about the situation they’re in it’s too late – their captors have already devised a clean plan and have already set it into motion, leaving Mary powerless. This is why, in my opinion, Mary’s frustratingly non-sensical flaws lead to her downfall.

However, McEwan forces us to sympathise with Mary because she is the main character and, despite my dislike of her, a victim. This challenges what we perceive a main character to be. Mary is not perfect, she is at fault. Yet she remains the lead.

“McEwan’s brilliance as a novelist lies in his ability to isolate discrete moments in life and invest them with incredible significance.” – Observer

It is a pattern of these discrete yet significant moments that Mary simply chooses to ignore. In fact, the beginning of the novel displays a quote by Cesare Pavese saying that travelling “forces you to…lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance.” Therefore the purpose of the narrative and her imperfections as a main character is to establish that people can fall due to not being in touch with their emotions and instincts; a human flaw that can be related to. And so the lesson here lies within Mary’s character build rather than the story itself… and Colin is just collateral damage.

Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee

Disgrace is also an exceptional example of the flaws of the human race displayed through a main character, as the Sunday Telegraph describes it as exploring “the furthest reaches of what it means to be human.” Disgrace features post-Apartheid South Africa from the perspective of a horny white man, David Lurie. The problem with this is that the novel is multi-layered, and we get to see everything through one perspective – Lurie’s. He does bad things while constantly and successfully justifying his actions and impulsivity. He rapes a student of his, has sex with a prostitute and justifies it all by comparing himself to a dog with “instincts”. The dog, in his mind, has been beaten for getting excited when there are female dogs near, yet the dog will still go after the female dogs due to his instincts. This is Lurie’s way of telling himself that he cannot be blamed for his actions when they are related to his sexual desire. He just can’t keep it in his pants.

"It was a male. Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it. This went on until the poor dog didn't know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide. […] There was something so ignoble in the spectacle that I despaired. One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. […] But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts."

When Melanie, the student Lurie begins a sexual relationship with, clearly does not desire a sexual encounter with him, he convinces himself he does not rape her by saying that he “does not sense in her a fully sexual appetite” and he seems to comfort himself saying that “that is only because she is still young.” He further reassures himself that even though their sex is “undesired to the core,” it is certainly “not rape, not quite that.”

“Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.”

In this way, by only reading these situations from Lurie’s perspective, the reader is misled. There are so many different sides to a story and Lurie’s is far from inclusive or reliable. Herein lies a human tragedy; that situations are not black and white, but rather filled with grey areas and faulty truths, much like the “white dilemma” in the new South Africa. Coetzee conveys this through centering the story of Disgrace around David Lurie and making him completely flawed, resulting in Lurie’s imperfections being vital to the narrative.

Finally, Nathalie, Mary and David are beacons that mark the future of writing, in which the characters are more realistic and relevant rather than unattainable. In which we can understand ourselves and our cores and what makes us the way we are and become better and more complete people.

- Siya