: Re: How do you make a story succeed in spite of an unsympathetic main character? I'm looking for techniques specific to a story with an unsympathetic main character. Confederacy of Dunces, for example.

@Annie587

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I suppose different people have different tastes. I agree much more with Craig than with Kate.

I haven't read Confederacy of Dunces or any of the other stories mentioned here except Macbeth, so I can't comment on the specifics of those.

Yes, I've read stories and seen movies and so on with heroes who I find totally unlikeable. And I routinely find that I quickly get bored with the story because I don't really care what happens to the hero. If the character is basically a good and decent person, I am cheering him on and wanting him to succeed. But if he is a total villain, I DON'T want him to succeed. He deserves to fail and I want him to fail.

If others find that they can be fascinated by a story about a horribly evil person ... okay. I guess I wouldn't rule out the possibility, but I can't think of such a story that I've enjoyed reading. I think this is quite distinct from a biography of a real evil person, by the way. I might well be interested in a book about Hitler or bin Laden or Blackmun or whomever, but I don't read such a book the same way I read a novel. I'm not getting immersed in the character and wondering what happens next and hoping for him to succeed and so on. I'm reading purely to learn historical facts.

I've read lots of stories where objectively the hero is a very evil person, but the writer is clearly trying to paint him in a way that gets us to want him to win. I find such stories distasteful. Like, I'm supposed to cheer when the serial rapist gets off by pulling that clever legal technicality? Umm, no. I don't like the story and I resent the attempted manipulation. (Note this is not the same as a story where I am supposed to cheer that the villain has reformed himself. I'm talking about the stories where I'm supposed to cheer because the villain got away with the crime.)

That is not to say that a hero has to be a perfect human being for me to be interested in a story. Some of the best fiction is about a person who overcomes his character flaws. And a very common story theme is the "redemption" story -- the character who starts out evil but turns good by the end. Indeed, a hero who is too perfect might be boring because he is too distant from the reader. (Not to mention that a hero who is too perfect becomes difficult to believe. I'm reminded of a really bad movie I saw once where two characters get into a conflict, and they just went so over the top, every step of the way, to make the hero 100% right and the other character 100% wrong, that I just found myself saying, "Oh, come on! He never, ever acted foolishly or got nasty or ANYTHING?")

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