There’s something strange I’ve noticed about literature.
In real life, we try to avoid unpleasant people. Self-absorbed windbags, compulsive liars, jealous souls, cowards, and those who always know exactly how everyone else should live.
But put one of these people into a book, and we’re suddenly willing to spend hundreds of pages in their company.
Sometimes, they even become our favorite characters.
Take Ostap Bender. A con man, a manipulator, a man whose moral principles are questionable at best. Meeting him in real life would probably end with a lighter wallet and an uncomfortable conversation with your relatives.
Yet on the page, we follow his adventures with delight.
Or Raskolnikov. A man commits murder and then spends hundreds of pages wrestling with questions he really should have asked himself a little earlier.
And somehow, we can’t stop reading.
Why?
I don’t think it’s because we like bad people.
I think we’re fascinated by people whose pieces don’t quite fit together.
Someone believes they’re honest but lies. Thinks they’re brave but acts like a coward. Remains absolutely convinced they’re right until life presents them with the bill.
It’s often in that gap between how people see themselves and what they actually do that a real story begins.
Flawless heroes are more difficult.
If a character always does the right thing, always knows the answer, and never doubts themselves, all the reader can do is watch a demonstration of moral superiority.
And that gets old rather quickly.
Of course, being unpleasant doesn’t automatically make someone an interesting literary character. Rudeness is no substitute for personality, cruelty doesn’t equal depth, and bad behavior isn’t a plot.
But a good writer can do something much more difficult: make us understand a person without requiring us to excuse them.
To me, that’s one of literature’s most fascinating qualities.
It lets us spend a little time inside someone else’s head. Even if, in real life, we’d prefer to keep a safe distance from its owner.
And here’s the curious part.
Sometimes, after finishing such a book, you begin to understand not only other people a little better.
But yourself as well.
Which, I must admit, isn’t always a pleasant experience.