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Favourite Literary Characters?

Belisarius said:
Mandella: From Haldeman's The Forever War; his sarcastic cynicism has also tremendously influenced my style.
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good to hear. i just acquired a copy, planning to read it after i finish rainbows end. contemporary scifi (and contemp. literature in general), or... maybe just what i'm reading, seems to suffer from a serious lack of truly engaging characters.

maybe it's just the way i'm seeing it, but this seems to be going in tandem with the way tv is trending toward more "reality" oriented shit. everyone loves the extremes nowadays. everyone wants characters that are either COMPLETELY ballistic or COMPLETELY realistic (i.e. boring) but nobody seems interested by the quirky, timeless characters that strike a genial balance in the middle of the spectrum. really a shame. but then again, maybe it's just that these much-lauded books i'm reading actually suck and i'm not getting the complete picture?
 
Yossarian.

(Bombardier and protagonist, Catch-22.)

Yossarian: Is Orr crazy?
Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: Of course he is. He has to be crazy to keep flying after all his close calls he's had.
Yossarian: Why can't you ground him?
Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: I can, but first he has to ask me.
Yossarian: That's all he's gotta do to be grounded?
Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: That's all.
Yossarian: Then you can ground him?
Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: No. Then I cannot ground him.
Yossarian: Aah!
Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: There's a CATCH?
Yossarian: A catch?
Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: Sure. Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat isn't really crazy, so I can't ground him.
Yossarian: Ok, let me see if I've got this straight. In order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying.
Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: You got it, that's Catch-22.
Yossarian: Whoo... That's some catch, that Catch-22.
Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: It's the best there is.
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I need to revisit this as you've got my mind reeling. Some brilliant picks so far.
 
i've never read catch-22 (shame on me) but that dialogue reminded me of jeeves and wooster whom are also fun characters. i forgot to mention that i've read 'the sun also rises' a number of times because of brett ashley. i think i looooves herrrr :)
 
The god emperor from Frank Herbert's "Dune" he must be the smartest creature alive, with all his actions for a purpose. Talks like a badass too
 
The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury
The Miller and The Pardoner - Geoffrey Chaucer
James Bond - Ian Fleming (the print version of Bond is something that no actor has been able to properly capture)
 
loial from the wheel of time series. saltheart foamfollower from the thomas covenant trilogy. hagrid. i fall in love with gentle giants.
 
There's lots of various characters from books I like, but for admired characters of series, Dirk Gently and Sherlock Holmes. Along with the majority of the characters in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
 
Belisarius said:
Mandella: From Haldeman's The Forever War; his sarcastic cynicism has also tremendously influenced my style.
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finally got around to finishing it. forever war graduated from shitter read to proper read quite fast, possibly owing to the fact that i have forever peace on loan to finish up as fast as i can possibly read. mandella is also the protagonist in that plot :)
 
I would have to second Yossarian from Catch-22 as one of my favorites.

Prabaker, Lin and Abdul Khader Khan from Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts are also some of my favorites. Especially Prabaker.

Raskalnikov from Crime and Punishment.

And Dmitry, Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov.

There's probably a bunch more favorites that I just can't think of right now. I've read too many goddamn books.
 
Cervantes' Don Quixote. Elia, which was a literary disguise of the essayist Charles Lamb. The narrator in all of Roberto Bolano's books, which may be the author, or his fictional double Arturo Belano, or any of the ghosts that embody all of his stories. Similarly, the narrator in all of Sebald's works. Marcel, of course, from A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
 
thujone said:
i've never read catch-22 (shame on me) but that dialogue reminded me of jeeves and wooster whom are also fun characters.
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don't feel bad, i've tried to read that book no less than 8 times, and get past the first chapter and say fuck it, every single time. i even am one of those people that tries to finish every book she starts, regardless of if she hates it or not, and the way it's written frustrates me so much i almost want to throw up. irrational and bizarre, but i just cannot get into that book.
you don't have to "love" all classics ;)
 
Don Gately of Infinite Jest
Oedipa Maas of Crying of Lot 49
The collective that narrates The Wasteland
Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses
Leopold Bloom of Ulysses
Molly Bloom of Ulysses
Falstaff from much of Shakespeare
Iago
Jakob Gradus from Nabokov's Pale Fire
Job from the Bible
The narrator from Borges' "The Book of Sand"
The narrator from Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
The narrator from Borges' "The Library of Babel"
Melquiades from 100 Years of Solitude
Clytemnestra from the Aeschylus play
Calypso in Homer
Milton's Satan
Euripides' Medea
Patrick Bateman from American Psycho
Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy
Dostoevsky's Underground Man
Rashkolnikov from Crime and Punishment
Jean Genet in The Thief's Journal
Don Quixote
Bill Burroughs in Junky
Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus
Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury
Everyone in everything by Hemingway (except for A Farewell to Arms)
Hedda Gabler
Shelley's Frankenstein (the creature)
Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart
The subject of Carpentier's "Voyage to the Seed"
All of Kafka's protagonists
Conrad's Kurtz
Virginia Wolf's Miss Dalloway
Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum
The protagonist of The Painted Bird

I have to force myself to stop.
 
Kenickie said:
what made you like her? from what i can tell she has awkward weird sex and dislikes herself.
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She dislikes herself because Pynchon is in love with himself and Oedipa's a projection of something Pynchon wants to keep hidden--even from himself. He spends the rest of his career trying to shut her up.

There's 1 sex scene in Crying. It's fun and completely wacko and everything I've ever written is basically a ripoff of that scene.
 
Franz in Kafka's 'The Trial'
Mersault in 'The Stranger'
Death from Terry Pratchett's discworld novels
 
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