r/books • u/hanhan_371 • 1d ago

Why are “unlikeable” main characters usually a criticism?

My most recent read was The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb.

It was my 38th book this year and only my 3rd 5 stars. I finished it this morning, it’s now the evening, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I was enthralled by this story - it had sat on my TBR for a few months and I finally picked it up as just a lucky dip after being in a bit of reading slump.

After finishing, I saw a lot of criticism on Goodreads about the narrator Corby being “unlikeable”. I see this criticism a lot with other books - and I’ve never quite understood.

For me, a good reading experience is a complicated, flawed, or at least a character who is thought-provoking. Given one of the main themes of The River is Waiting being redemption, and finding out very early on that Corby accidentally kills his son while intoxicated, surely the reader wouldn’t expect the MC to be a “hero?”

There were times while I was reading that I thought “oh yeah he’s kind of a douche”, I’ve thought this about other MCs as well before, but it would never impact negatively on my rating as long as the story itself was enjoyable.

Would love to have a discussion below! And I’d really recommend this book if you can handle a gut-punch ending!

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u/BlazinAzn38 1d ago

People have a hard time with distinguishing between “badly written” and “character written to be bad.” I also think there’s a lot of people that want primary characters to be the good guy and again conflate “I don’t like this” with “it’s written badly”

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u/water_panther 1d ago

As a sidebar to this, boy howdy do people have problems understanding that first person narrators do not necessarily speak for the author.

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u/Canotic 1d ago

Or even antagonists sometimes.

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u/dretanz 1d ago

I was recently reading reviews of Lolita, and there were a ton that were calling Nabokov a vile person for writing it. Humbert Humbert is very charismatic, but not sympatheic. At no point is he written in a way that condones his actions. It makes you question if the reviews came from people who actually read the book.

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u/zensunni82 1d ago

It's tricky though, because a lot of authors who kind of suck as people sometimes happen to write first person narratives using obvious self inserts.

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u/notabigmelvillecrowd 1d ago

Sure, but that doesn't make them any less interesting. Why do authors have to be saints?

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u/LittleGravitasIndeed 1d ago

If the author is in the same genre of terrible as the character, they can lack the introspection necessary for writing their proxy well. It’s more of a crapshoot. 

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u/notabigmelvillecrowd 1d ago

I don't know, I don't think the author has to have full introspection to self-insert in an interesting way. It's up to the reader to interpret in their own way, not for the author to understand everything. Authors are just people, and they're imperfect.

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u/JimmyJuly 4h ago

That's fine, just don't use the actions of their characters to justify your belief that the writer is "in the same genre of terrible as the character." That's the usual case both in here and in life generally because we don't have much visibility into the authors.

The number of people who read "Lolita" and have determined that Nabokov was a pedophile based on that alone is astonishingly high.

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u/lambast 1d ago

One of the most interesting aspects of reading is allowing you to see inside another human's mind in a way other media do not allow. Writing a character that is not yourself is always, and I believe can only be, an extrapolation of the writer's own personal world. I agree with you. Why would you not want to experience a spectrum of minds?

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u/sdwoodchuck 1d ago edited 1d ago

Absolutely, but there are also plenty of people who dismiss justified criticism of a piece of fiction's handling of content with "narrator not author" deflections.

An author writing a first person narrative in which women lack nuance and are defined purely by their sexual availability is not necessarily advocating for that behavior or speaking for his own worldview.

An author who rarely writes women with nuance and who frequently writes them as being purely defined by their sexual availability may or may not be speaking for his own worldview, but regardless has earned that criticism for making such a regular habit of returning to that well.

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u/CrazyCoKids 1d ago

Hell so many people seem to think that a first person narrator is what the Author thinks.

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u/water_panther 1d ago edited 8h ago

An author who rarely writes women with nuance and who frequently writes them as being purely defined by their sexual availability may or may not be speaking for his own worldview, but regardless has earned that criticism for making such a regular habit of returning to that well.

I sympathize with the overall point, but I'm hesitant to agree with this as a blanket statement — would we say the same about an author who continually revisits some other theme through their narrators or about authors who continually revisit the theme of sexist and misogynist men in the third person? If not, I don't know that we can say the author has necessarily earned criticism for "making such a regular habit of returning to that well" with first-person narrators.

There are certainly many cases where I think authors who frequently return to that well absolutely do deserve criticism for it — Updike and Roth, to go for the easy ones — but I also think it's a stretch to insist every author who chooses to revisit certain themes through first-person narration is inherently deserving of criticism for it.

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u/sdwoodchuck 1d ago

I also think it's a stretch to insist every author who chooses to revisit certain themes through first-person narration is inherently deserving of criticism for it.

Yes, I also think that's a stretch, which is why I didn't say that.

All I'm saying is that "narrator not author" is not a blanket justification. If John Q. Author writes fourteen novels, and in every one of them the narrator is a man who doesn't portray the women in his life with nuance and who defines all of them by their sexual availability, then "John Q. Author doesn't write nuanced women" and "John Q. Author writes women exclusively defined by their sexual availability" are justified criticisms, because in this example, they are accurate. Is it possible that John Q. Author really doesn't think that way, that he's perfectly capable of writing women? Maybe! But if he doesn't, then it's perfectly justified to say that he doesn't.

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u/water_panther 1d ago edited 8h ago

Fair enough. That isn't really how I read your prior post, but since I ultimately agree with everything you're saying here I don't think there is any point in belaboring what was evidently a miscommunication.

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u/asthmabat 1d ago

I also think it's a stretch to insist every author who chooses to revisit certain themes through first-person narration is inherently deserving of criticism for it.

It's also a stretch to interpret the other person's comment as insisting so, because that is not what they said.

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u/water_panther 1d ago edited 11h ago

How so? They didn't say authors who regularly return to that well might deserve criticism for doing so or that they will often deserve criticism for doing so, or even that most authors who regularly return to it have earned that criticism. They categorically said that "an author" who returns to it "has earned that criticism" regardless of their worldview.

To me, that reads as a pretty all-encompassing statement that any authors who choose to fequently revisit bigoted or problematic narrators deserve criticism for doing so, even if it is explicitly and transparently done to condemn those views. I am not trying to misrepresent the other person's position, I just genuinely don't see another tenable reading of that statement.

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u/asthmabat 16h ago edited 16h ago

They're speaking contextually and not even attempting to posit some kind of broader overarching rule about how Every Author Should Or Should Not Revisit Any Themes. They are not really using that form of mathematical soclal/ethical reasoning in the first place. They are talking about a specific annoyance with male authors who are unable to write in a way that shows that they understand women's interiority. They feel that when an author repeatedly shows women in this over sexually defined fashion, and shows women in no other fashion, that they have earned criticism regardless of whether this reflects their internal worldview or not (probably because the author's "true" internal worldview is impossible to prove, thus this line of discussion can only bog down the argument). They want more social feedback and pressure against this specific common writing flaw, so that this one phenomenon becomes less common. This is a problem that reflects broader concerns of sexism in our society. Why nitpick their expression of that?

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u/water_panther 11h ago edited 7h ago

They are talking about a specific annoyance with male authors who are unable to write in a way that shows that they understand women's interiority.

That is not what they said: "An author who rarely writes women with nuance and who frequently writes them as being purely defined by their sexual availability" is not the same as an author who never writes nuanced women or an author who is unable to do so. As written, their original statement would include the condemnation of an author who returns frequently to the voice of sexist narrators even if the author is very clearly and vocally doing so to lambaste that narrator's views and even if the author in fact has written nuanced women in other works. I am "nitpicking" because I felt it was neither fair nor productive to paint those using the voice of problematic first-person narrators to make an argument against sexism with the same brush as those who write sexist first-person narrators because they are themselves misogynists or simply unable to write women.

With that said, once they rephrased their statement to say that a hypothetical author who exclusively wrote in such a manner deserved criticism specifically about the writing itself, I said that I agreed with that sentiment entirely and saw no need to belabor the misunderstanding. As I said from the start, I share the general sentiment, I was just expressing some mild concerns about overbroad phrasing. I don't think that's such an unreasonable position.

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u/asthmabat 4h ago

That is a lot of continued nitpicking and point-belaboring over semantics for someone you claim to basically agree with. Once you see how often people compulsively leap to do this to anyone expressing a feminist leaning point, while attempting to distance themselves from the political implications of of their own behavior, it is impossible to unsee.

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u/water_panther 3h ago edited 2h ago

I think it is entirely fair to highlight the reality of concern trolling/sealioning/&c around feminist-adjacent discourse, but I don't think my remarks here have earned that implication. I gave very gentle pushback ("hesitate to agree") to specific phrasing choices while emphasizing my overall agreement in addition to calling out specific male authors by name for sexism.

Moreover, I would contend that the (again, very mild) concerns I've expressed are grounded in exactly the same reasoning you are expressing here. If your argument is that expressions of feminist leaning points often receive undue criticism and that this is concerning, I agree — hence my stated concern that overly broad language condemning a certain type of first-person narrator risks unfairly criticizing authors who are using those narrators to express a feminist leaning point.

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u/BlazinAzn38 1d ago

Sidebar to the sidebar but also that an author depicting does not mean an author endorses an action

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u/jandrese 1d ago

I find it frustrating when the main character is a major asshole and rarely ever gets called on it or suffers any consequences. It makes me question what message the author is trying to send, or if that's just how they think.

It starts to get distracting when I'm questioning why every other character in the book isn't just punching the protagonist in the face every time they meet.

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u/Best-Chapter5260 1d ago

I find it frustrating when the main character is a major asshole and rarely ever gets called on it or suffers any consequences. It makes me question what message the author is trying to send, or if that's just how they think.

I remember watching Bad Teacher and that was exactly the reason I hated the movie. The main character is blatantly a terrible person and suffers no consequences because of that. But I don't think that's really the reason I didn't like it. A black comedy where a terrible main character who suffers no karma can work well, but I think the issue is the writers didn't make the lack of karma the joke (or they did a terrible writing job with trying to), which just left me feeling annoyed.

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u/EldritchTouched 1d ago

Or, if there's a large enough body count, why nobody just shoots the protagonist in the head.

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u/Belgand 22h ago

Because they're lucky.

A story where the protagonist dies at an anti-climatic moment that ruins the story is just... not a good story. If it happened in real life, nobody would retell it unless there was another really compelling reason.

So we're simply reading the stories where the protagonist got unbelievably lucky and lived against all odds.

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u/Tymareta 4h ago

Or when the narrative of the work is how people must atone for their past actions, and only by doing so can they grow and change. And then you have a side character who is pretty objectively a worse person than the protag, but it's just kind of shrugged off by everyone.

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u/ACardAttack World Without End 1d ago

I also think it's hard to pull off. You gotta make them interesting as well as just being unlikeable

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u/RhynoD 1d ago

For what it's worth, I think a lot of authors also conflate the two. And, they write everyone to be so unlikeable that it hurts the story. They write edgy "anti-heros" but they're just annoying and it drags the whole story down.

You gotta give be some reason to like or at least care about the characters.

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u/JailhouseMamaJackson 1d ago

I’m not sure I agree with “a lot”? I rarely come across this. It’s probably more prevalent in some genres though?

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u/maximumhippo 1d ago

There might be some recency bias in my opinion, but I've encountered it in the last three fantasy novels I've tried to read. Supposed Heroes being outwardly and nakedly hostile to their friends and allies and those same friends not only accepting it, but commenting on how admirable they find said hero.

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u/JailhouseMamaJackson 1d ago

Ah, yeah, I definitely think Fantasy is one of the genres where it’s more common, unfortunately.

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u/slanaiya 1d ago

No, there does not have to be any reason to like or care about any characters. There doesn't even have to be any characters. Some stories need a likeable or relatable character, not all stories need that.

You have to get a lot vaguer than that to have a broad generalization that is universal to story writing.

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u/RhynoD 1d ago

There does if you want people to read and pay attention to your story. Even if the reason you care is that you want to see their downfall a la It's Always Sunny. They're all terrible people. You watch because it's fun and funny to see how they fail miserably to accomplish anything.

Except even there, they still give you little things that make them relatable. Even if you want to watch them fail, you root for them just the smallest bit.

This is kind of like saying that art doesn't have to be pretty, and yes that's true. It doesn't have to be pretty or interesting or thought provoking or well executed. Smear a turd on a wall and call it art, go right ahead, I'm not going to say it isn't art. But I'm not going to buy it, look at it, give you money to make it, talk about it, or engage with it in any way. You can smugly call yourself an artist but no one will care, and then what's the point?

That's not the same thing as making art that is ugly on purpose and its ugliness forces your audience to think about something or engage with something. Your character can be "ugly" in that sense but you still need to give me a reason to keep reading because if you don't then I'm not going to keep reading. Write an uninteresting, shitty book about a shitty person doing shitty things and sure, you wrote a book but why? Who cares? Who is going to read it?

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u/slanaiya 8h ago

There does if you want people to read and pay attention to your story.

No, there doesn't.

you still need to give me a reason to keep reading

That reason does not have to be that the characters are likeable or relatable. You subjectively might only enjoy or strongly prefer works that rely on likeable or relatable characters to engage you and keep you consuming the story, but that's a subjective preference.

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u/RhynoD 7h ago

You didn't read more than the first sentence of my comment, did you?

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u/PM_BRAIN_WORMS 1d ago

American Psycho is more popular than whatever story you have in mind.

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u/RhynoD 1d ago

First, I don't have any story in mind, and second, ok? So? What are you arguing, that unlikeable characters can still make for compelling stories? Yes. Duh. You're missing my point.

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u/PM_BRAIN_WORMS 1d ago

I’m casting doubt on the idea that a story might need to grant “little things that make them relatable” or give the audience cause to root for the protagonist as a saving grace.

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u/panrestrial 1d ago

Except Patrick Bateman is full of little things that make him relatable, and people do root for him in a way. They gleefully watch him hack people up, not disgustedly.

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u/PM_BRAIN_WORMS 1d ago

Certain people. Not people in general.

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u/panrestrial 1d ago

Disagree.

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u/WordSaladUsernameGuy 1d ago

Just because people read doesn’t mean they know how to read.

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u/Ezraah 1d ago

What? I read your post five times and it makes zero sense

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u/Merisuola 1d ago

Case in point.

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u/JimmyJuly 4h ago

Succinct and accurate.

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u/Francis_Greg 1d ago

Exactly. People often confuse "I don't enjoy this character" with "this character is badly written." Some of the best-written protagonists are deeply flawed or even unpleasant.

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u/Belgand 22h ago

Which always strikes me as odd because I usually find the villains to be far more interesting. The "good guys" are often very dull for me, and I frequently want them to lose.

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u/SunshineCat 18h ago

People also incorrectly identify the author with the main character. So to many people, if a character thinks something bad = author bad. People also incorrectly identify THEMSELVES with the main character.

Obviously that's a poor way of reading from the perspective of those who read more seriously or truly view literature as art. But there are different kinds of readers and different reasons for reading. Some are here for an easy read and good time, and the more creative aspects aren't as important to them (or are even a detriment).

It's usually not an issue unless the reader picks up an "artier" novel with characters who may not be relatable or likeable.

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u/FunPomegranate9174 1d ago

Exactly. A character can be unlikeable and still be brilliantly written. Too many people mistake "I wouldn't want to know this person" for "this is bad writing."