In an article for Lit Hub, Stacey D’Erasmo examines characters who rest in the difficult place between hero and villain, the complicated protagonists that aren’t sure can be trusted.
Most things in life are neither all dark nor all light. There are grey areas to explore, some of which are playful and benign, while others are malignant and deceitful. “Many thrillers rely on this kind of deep unease—is that helpful neighbor a good Samaritan or a serial killer? is the smiling nurse offering medicine or poison?—because that experience taps a core anxiety about whether we are safe or not,” D’Erasmo says.
In conventional thrillers, the truth of a character is eventually revealed, but less conventional fiction may let ambiguous characters remain mysterious. “In order to write a character who can’t be trusted, however, and have that untrustworthiness matter, you have to commit to feeling continually unsafe and be willing to head into the in-between space where you might find yourself identifying with a character of whom you don’t entirely approve or who even frightens you,” D’Erasmo writes.
That might not be your thing. But if you want to take that journey, D’Erasmo recommends keeping one concept in mind: Everyone is the hero of their own life. “Everyone walks around thinking, on some level, If you only knew,” she says. “True, accountable confessions with a view to making amends are rare. Much more common are explanations, defenses, rationalizations, and self-mythologizing.”
Behavior we wouldn’t tolerate in life becomes compelling material in fiction. ‘Your ambiguous character is doing whatever they’re doing, and saying whatever they’re saying, in order to get something that’s important to them,” D’Erasmo writes. “Moreover, that thing, whatever it is, including the reader’s sympathy, matters to them for a deep, human reason.”
D’Erasmo uses the example of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. He builds a criminal empire to become the kind of wealthy man who might win Daisy’s heart. We might read him as a cynical criminal, but in his mind, Gatsby is a hopeless romantic. Importantly, Fitzgerald doesn’t ask us to choose which. “Through Nick Caraway’s eyes as narrator, we see the criminal, the romantic, and the class politics in which this ambiguous character is embedded,” D’Erasmo notes. “Were the novel to moralize in favor of any of these, it would go flat. We would close the book knowing just what to think, and never think about it again.”
In fact, none of the characters come off that well, she adds. Daisy kills a woman and takes no blame. Nick observes events and does nothing to intervene. “Fitzgerald’s relative simplicity craftwise blossoms into endless complexities thematically because he doesn’t push these facts into a shape that would let anyone, including us, off the hook,” D’Erasmo writes.
