Nefarious novelists manipulate their readers' demand for sympathetic characters

Really, here's the most important reason to be careful about indulging in the entirely natural impulse to sympathize with the admirable and interesting characters in a novel.  It turns out that certain novelists are aware of this predilection and have learned to manipulate it for their own sinister ends.  One solution is to avoid all such books.  Use this post as a guide.  Another is to be cautious.  Very cautious.  One can't be too safe.

Vladimir Nabokov, for example.  In Lolita (1955), a murderous pedophile writes his confession.  He (Humbert Humbert, and Vladimir Nabokov) uses every trick in the book, and invents a few new ones.  Readers who are not extremely vigilant almost inevitably find themselves relaxing their guard.  HH is so erudite, and there are worse monsters in the world, and - well, there's a lot more like that.  Most importantly, we spend most of the first-person novel with him, and he's not only charming, but dazzling, a self-pitying master of flimflammery.  We slip into the narrator's world.  Isn't that what we're supposed to do in a novel?

Lolita is a useful case because it is actually about readerly sympathy.  Taking the book as a real document, the author is justifying his crimes to someone, asking someone to forgive him, appealing for sympathy.  Taking the book as a novel, the reader often has to struggle to escape the natural pull of sympathy.  Whether or not HH, at the end of the novel, begins to understand the true nature of his own crimes is incidental to the way the device works.

Nabokov continued to explore this idea in the novels that followed Lolita. In Pnin (1957), the hapless Russian immigrant Professor Pnin is genuinely sympathetic, a brilliant, warm creation.  Many readers, indulging in their fellow-feeling for this marvelous character (see the end of Chapter Six, the punch bowl, unbelievable), never quite notice how he's being abused by the narrator, a certain "Vladimir Nabokov."  Poor Pnin, with a burst of creative solution-finding, actually has to flee the novel.  In Lolita, the villain hides behind false sympathy; in Pnin, behind real sympathy.  Pale Fire (1962) twists the idea in yet another direction.  Nabokov sure enjoyed the author-as-puppeteer metaphor.

Ford Madox Ford famously begins The Good Soldier (1915) with "This is the saddest story I have ever heard."  Now here, one thinks, with this story we'll find some first-rate sympathizin'.  "Poor Florence," the narrator calls his dead wife, again and again, and Captain Ashburnham is the model of an English gentleman, and "I loved Leonora always and, to-day, I would very cheerfully lay down my life, what is left of it, in her service."  But in fact the characters turn out to be ridiculous, and the narrator himself loses sympathy for them as he tells the story - actually, because he tells the story.  The act of storytelling in this case destroys sympathy. 

And what, I ask you, is behind the inscrutable expression of Little William Thackeray, perched up there at the top of the blog?  He's keeping a careful eye on the readers of Vanity Fair (1847-48), watching them puzzle over exactly which characters are supposed to receive the reader's sympathy.  The most likable character is selfish and immoral; the other candidate is selfish and priggish.  The men are idiots or dishrags.  The narrator keeps telling us that everything's fine, what do we expect, that's just the way things are.

These are some of my all-time favorite books.  You may have noticed that these are all comic writers.  So the savvy sympathetic reader might want to avoid comic writers.  Dickens wanted his readers to like his characters, so he's safe.  I think.

All right, I'm tired of not liking anyone.  Tomorrow, I'm going to sympathize with sympathy.

* I want to recommend, as strongly as possible, Nabokov's last Russian novel, The Gift (1938), which is neither tricky, nor icy, nor icky, nor whatever other adjectives people use to diminish Nabokov.  It's a perfect Bildungsroman, and I have no idea why it's not more read.  The Chernyshevsky chapter alone is one of the best things Nabokov ever wrote.