: If characters never do bad things, you don't have a plot, and if every bad action is followed by a speech about how bad it is, you end up with a didactic polemic, not a novel. It's possible

If characters never do bad things, you don't have a plot, and if every bad action is followed by a speech about how bad it is, you end up with a didactic polemic, not a novel.

It's possible to frame even the worst actors within a larger moral framework --consider Nabakov's Lolita where the main character in a first person narrative is an unrepentant molester. Nabakov eventually brings the novel to a point of resolution where the main character --in a way true to his personality and characterization --finally comes to at least a dim understanding that what he did was wrong, and why. This, in my opinion, is far more effective than just bashing the reader's head in with a message that we hopefully all know already anyway. Compare also Woody Allen's Match Point --superficially, it's about a very bad person who gets everything he wants, and isn't punished for any of it. However, you don't end the film admiring or envying that character --you come to understand that being that kind of person is a punishment just in itself (which is also the message of Plato's Republic).

Personally, I'm not ever bothered by bad behavior in fiction unless I feel the author is using it to actively promote moral principles I disagree with --it seems unlikely that what you write would give that impression.

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