Don’t you hate that? You’re well into reading the latest novel you picked up at the bookstore or downloaded to your e-reader, and that character with whom you’ve become so comfortably infatuated does something that gives you that “uh-oh” feeling deep in your gut. A queasy sensation you want so much to hold at bay seeps through the cracks in your psychological armor, and you wonder, Who is this person? followed by the even worse, Did I ever know him?
Yes, you did know him, but that character is in fact changing right before your reading eyes. How dare he! You liked him just as he was. Or to paraphrase Jack Nicholson’s character in ‘A Few Good Men’, “You want him that way! You NEED him that way!” If he’s going to be different, if he was different all along, you don’t want to know. Could it be that, “You can’t handle the truth!”? I don’t believe that. Because the truth is, as everyone knows, people change. Why not characters?
I recently experienced this while reading George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy ‘A Song of Ice and Fire‘. If you’ve read any of the five books published so far in this series (there will be seven when it’s done), then you know the character named Jaime Lannister.
From the moment he first appears on page, Jaime is someone you know you’re going to love to hate. Traitor, incestuous lover ... to silence an eight-year-old boy who “knows too much”, Jaime throws him from a castle tower (does he survive? read the series, and find out). There is NOTHING redeeming about this character. Nothing, that is, until somewhere in the third book (I think it was the 3rd; hey, I’ve read four volumes in this series--the shortest coming in at about 700 pages, the longest at 1200--so if I can’t remember exactly where my reaction to him began to change, give me a break already).
I don’t think I’ll spoil too much by saying that with a little back story here and there, a change of narrator granting a new perspective that casts doubts on the versions of Jaime’s life I’d come to know, and some personal development on his part due to shifting circumstances, I began to doubt my feelings about that character. Or I suppose I should say, my feelings about him, because by then I was so immersed in the story that Jaime wasn’t just a literary character. He was a very real person. And he was changing. Which demanded that I change also, and as we all know that’s not easy. In fact, it can be downright painful.
My pain came in the form of a frustratingly fascinating sense of self-doubt. Could I have really been that wrong in my initial assessment of Jaime? Could I be that far off as I began to look at him in a different light? Was something wrong with me that I could possibly see him as a character that was even the slightest bit sympathetic? What was George R.R. Martin doing to me? The answer is simple. Martin was exercising the author’s right--in the case of character development, I would go so far as to say, his responsibility--to have some fun with his readers in a sadistic sort of way. To hurt them ... just a little. And therein lies the rub. By the way in which Martin caused that discomfort, was he being too manipulative? Was I set up to be misled? Was it a case of being misled at all?
While presenting a chapter from a novel in progress to my writers group, one member commented about the main character, “I don’t like what he’s doing here. I don’t think I like him right now.” She said she’d found him to be a very sympathetic character up to then, and seemed apologetic about saying she didn’t much care for him at the moment. That was okay. I didn’t mind her saying that because I had plans for that character. He wasn’t going to be the same person by the novel’s end, and he needed a dubious baseline from which to make that change. It was that baseline my critic didn’t like. Hearing her told me I just might be on the right track.
Whether the piece of work involved is plot driven, character driven, or a slice-of-life vignette, to be true to life, by the end of the story the most important characters should go through some sort of profound change. It needn’t be for the better. They could come out the other end a substantially worse person than when they began, for that matter, as long as they’re different. But there must a limit to this somewhere, right?
So here are my questions for today--
How much change is tolerable in a character? How long can we leave a main character in the guise of an unsympathetic person, and expect the reader to continue caring what happens to him--in other words, to keep on reading? Can an unsympathetic character carry a story while remaining a son-of-a-bitch to the end?
P.S. - I must admit, when I write my not so likable--dare I say, evil--characters is when I have the most fun writing.
Until next time...
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