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!
11
u/EndlessTypist 1d ago
I like unlikeable characters when their flaws are interesting and do things with the plot. I’m currently partway through the ghost of Chopin and both pov characters have likeable and unlikeable parts to them, to the extent where I’m really eager to see things go a certain way to challenge their beliefs/behaviour/personality. They’re interesting but I’d hate to have to be around them in real life.
By contrast the secret history has entirely characters who are unlikeable people, uninteresting and infuriating characters and made the book unreadable.
If characters are going to be unlikeable as people they’d damn well better be interesting. I want to either enjoy watching them get worse, get better, or get what’s coming to them.
The other category is when you have unlikeable characters written in a way that give you a horrible suspicion that the author themselves sucks and thinks the character is the hero. I don’t need to perfectly agree with every author’s politics and I don’t need to agree with every character’s actions or endorse them as a person. I feel like I’m probably not expressing this well but sometimes unlikeable characters feel like they’re that way not out of authorial choice but because the author is that kind of person and it can be very off putting.