To recap, here are some of the ways that we described Juliette:
- beautiful despite a complete lack of attention to her appearance
- tough, competent, hardworking and resourceful
- rose up through her own hard work and a little bit of luck
- solitary
- humble and proletarian
- compassionate with a strong moral compass
- open-minded, wise, and maternal with a strong sense of community
- has a Romeo-Juliet style love affair that actually ends up happily
I came to the conclusion that the deeply flawed heroes are the most interesting and the most human. In order to portray a human realistically, authors must have all their characters experience the "infinite gamut of emotions" (What French Women Know, Debra Ollivier). People in real life experience joy, rage, annoyance, fear, love, despair, melancholy, confusion, loneliness. Therefore fictional characters should experience all these emotions too (or at least seem capable of experiencing these emotions--I understand the constraints of plot and space), even the villains. Heroes should have serious flaws, villains should have redeeming qualities. The hero and the villain must be as similar to each other as possible without being indistinguishable. This is a fine line for an author to walk. You don't want a hero so flawed that all of your readers dislike them. But if your characters have no serious flaws or complexes, they risk becoming one-dimensional like cartoon superheroes.
We have a tendency to believe that perfection is best. That if characters are perfectly put together (if they have a surplus of good qualities and only a few easily excusable bad qualities), we will love them and become absorbed in their stories, rooting for them all the way. Authors should worry less about whether serious flaws in their characters will make them unlikeable--the quickest way to make a character unlikeable is to make them too perfect.
I do agree with you that Juliette isn't necessarily the most interesting character in the world, but I feel like you're portraying her and Bernard as a little too flat. Maybe Juliette doesn't have a token flaw... but think of the way she never visited her father (I remember one of her excuses was "pride" which isn't necessarily the most attractive thing for someone to have... I feel like a perfect hero would hold on to their family ties). Bernard has a lot of the villain traits but for one, I felt that he really did try to inhabit a sort of father role for Luke (before, of course, he discovered Luke's betrayal). We also talked about how Bernard really believed in what he was doing -- for all his rage, arrogance, and coldness, he really did seem to care for the silo, concerned that the rebellion was going to collapse the whole thing. I do agree with you about the perfection but I think authors can also go a little overboard in giving their character one huge token flaw and not bother fleshing the character out. Laziness goes both ways.
ReplyDeleteI do realize that Bernard is not an entirely flat character, but I wasn't focusing on Bernard in this post. I agree that he is not entirely a villain because he believes what he is doing is the right thing for the silo, and because, as you said, he tried to be a mentor for Lukas until he felt that Lukas was no longer working in the best interest of the silo. I also agree that one huge flaw can be too simplistic. However, it seemed to me that Juliette's flaws were barely noticeable.
DeleteIn terms of my own personal preferences in fiction (and film), I agree with you (see my own recent post on my ambivalence about heroic narratives). And yet it seems like something *like* perfection--or at least a character who is closer to perfection than we can see ourselves ever being--is indeed what a lot of people are looking for in a hero. Juliette is analogous to an action hero in contemporary American film: there's generally not a lot of internal conflict, or inner life at all, just a dutiful and brave rising to the occasion and defying of death (over and over again). This isn't a totally fair characterization of Juliette, as there *is* a backstory there, and she does experience some misgivings about her role as hero. But I do see what you're saying. She's less a character we relate to, or gain insight into human life from, and more someone we admire and through whom we vicariously experience heroism and adventure.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of a quote from John Wayne, referring to the "complex" hero in a film he was working on: "Screw ambiguity. Perversion and corruption masquerade as ambiguity. I don't like ambiguity. I don't trust ambiguity."
And it sounds like, at least in terms of literary protagonists, you don't trust John Wayne!
In many ways, I quite agree with Mary in the idea that Howey pushes the idea of a perfect hero in Juliette, who, although having various problems, rises from the bottom of the society for a higher cause. As a character, she is not very believable since she is flawless, such that Howey also shows Bernard as pure evil. The reason many found this novel quite interesting however, is not the character flaws or lack of such defects, yet instead the unexpectedness of the plot and how quickly it can change. Therefore, the reader does not know what will occur next and the mystery of the plot makes up for the uninteresting aspects of the hero and villain
ReplyDeleteI really do feel you on this. I like my favorite characters -- many of whom I'd consider my heroes, not despite their deeply destructive qualities but partly because of them -- not because they happen to fulfill some "good person" quota or because on some cosmic moral scale their benevolent traits outweigh their flaws, but because of the sum of their being. I can't just water my love for these characters down to a bullet point list -- it is the sum of their personality (both the positive traits and the more grating ones), their experiences, and how they treat other people and how they interact with the world, that ultimately draw me to them.
ReplyDeleteWhat frustrates me sometimes is that with an industry like the film industry, where many hundreds of millions of dollars can lie at stake with a single feature, characters can become blatantly formulaic. Like you say, it can be risky for an artist to deviate from the mold of "mostly perfect with a dash of flaws," and when so much money is at stake, unfortunately that risk feels like it's too much to take -- even as some people in the audience tire of the overused model of heroism.