Likable, sympathetic or just compelling?

What’s the priority for a protagonist in fiction: likable, sympathetic or just compelling?

It seems counter-intuitive, but not every protagonist needs to be sympathetic and likable. They do need to be compelling enough that the reader wants to invest their precious time in the journey.

We don’t meet too many saints in real life. No one is one hundred per cent good or moral. We find fascination in people’s flaws and contradictions. Fictional characters are no different. The Mary-Sue is dull, unrealistic, even laughable. We want struggle, drama, conflict.

Usually this comes with internal conflict, the struggle to become someone better. But what about characters who know and accept who and what they are? Who act in selfish and harmful ways?

Defined Limits

With action-heroes, it’s easy to identify. James Bond is a government assassin. Sherlock Holmes an emotionally repressed, compulsive puzzle solver. Jack Reacher is a self-appointed latter-day sheriff with an Old Testament approach to violent retribution. It’s their drive and hyper-competence that pulls the reader in.

What about other genres? Literary fiction? The classics? Anna Karenina wants it all – the dashing count, motherhood, social standing – and throws herself in front of a train when she can’t have it.

Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights? A hideous pair of narcissists. Readers are compelled by their train-wreck of mutually-assured destruction.

Tragic Inheritance

Shakespeare understood the tragic hero well. Macbeth’s ambition and Othello’s ugly jealousy destroy them both. Richard III’s gleeful mischief in pursuit of the crown is horrific, but he makes us complicit in his schemes.

Patrick Bateman in American Psycho? It’s the draw of the psychopathic would-be serial killer. The talented Tom Ripley? We’re on edge wondering if he’ll get away with murder.

Stevens in Remains of the Day is a very different anti-hero. A man so self-conceited, so delusional, it’s probably the first example of excessive dignity as a tragic flaw.

A downward path

Some characters begin sympathetic and lose it as the story unfolds. Paul Atreides is the naive idealist at the beginning of Dune, but the calculating self-appointed Messiah responsible for the death of millions by the end.

Amy Elliot-Dunne from Gone Girl? From abductee to murderous harpie, tipped over the edge by betrayal. But was she ever likable? Sympathetic? Stable?

What about Bella Swan, the teen every-woman at the center of the vampire-werewolf underworld?, Vapid, whining, passive. She begins as an angsty teen and goes precisely nowhere. Clumsy, awkward, boring and allegedly a plain-Jane, torn between two ‘hot guys,’ she can’t even make a decision. Twilight ‘succeeds’ in spite of, not because of her.

On trend

The Secret History, The Girl on the Train, Yellowface, Addie LaRue; all of them have unlikable protagonists. And all of them by female authors. The compelling but unlikable protagonist isn’t reserved for male writers. Nor is the enjoyment of such limited to male readers. All of those titles draw huge numers of female readers. As do Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and Anna Karenina. Anyone who says they like Cathy, Jane and Anna hasn’t read the books properly.

Danger, Will Robinson

Some of these are cautionary tales. Tragic heroes and heroines get their come-uppance. Morally gray protagonists rarely, if ever, get the Happy Ever After. Even if they believe in the HEA, it’s beyond their reach, or else they reject it, condemned to wander forever or live in a hell of their own making.

But why?

Society expects us to work for the common good, to be kind, generous, sympathetic; to condemn immorality. Perhaps we revel in these unlikable, reprehensible protagonists as a safety-valve. We can live out proxy-lives free of judgment or restraint.