Well, I was thinking about this the other day and wanted to know what other people thought. Usually I hear people talking about characters that they really love and admire, so I wanted to know who were the characters that people really despised. Here are some of my picks:
Daisy and Tom Buchanan from "The Great Gatsby"
Charles and Lucie Darnay from "A Tale of Two Cities"
Kitty Fane from "The Painted Veil"
Rosemary Hoyt from "Tender is the Night"
Fermina Daza from "Love in the Time of Cholera"
pretty much everyone from "Our Town"
pretty much everyone from "The Scarlet Letter"
pretty much everyone from "Kristin Lavransdatter" except for Lavrans
Jewel from "As I Lay Dying"
Scarlett, Melanie, and Ashley from "Gone With the Wind"
*I would name some people from Shakespeare but most of them die on their own*
and there are some others too but that's just to get the thread started
Daisy and Tom Buchanan from "The Great Gatsby"
Charles and Lucie Darnay from "A Tale of Two Cities"
Kitty Fane from "The Painted Veil"
Rosemary Hoyt from "Tender is the Night"
Fermina Daza from "Love in the Time of Cholera"
pretty much everyone from "Our Town"
pretty much everyone from "The Scarlet Letter"
pretty much everyone from "Kristin Lavransdatter" except for Lavrans
Jewel from "As I Lay Dying"
Scarlett, Melanie, and Ashley from "Gone With the Wind"
*I would name some people from Shakespeare but most of them die on their own*
and there are some others too but that's just to get the thread started
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Mon, August 20, 2007 - 9:12 PMRight now I'm reading Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac for the first time, and I would definitely kill Lucien off. I suspect Balzac will do the deed for me ( no spoilers, please!)
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Mon, August 27, 2007 - 11:20 AMCan I have the light glinting off the shaving mirror of "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" and temporarily blinding the driver of a brewery dray who promptly runs over Leopold Bloom round about the bottom of page one of Ulysses? -
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Mon, August 27, 2007 - 11:26 AMWhat I'm curious about, Oscar FdJ, is that every named character on your list is a woman--or else the woman's husband.
Can you think of female characters in literature that you _do_ like, or do you think that literature represents women in annoying ways, or.....?
Me, I'd like to see just about everybody in Middle Earth die of an STD.
I'd also like to impale Stephen Deadalus through the eye with a rusty fork. -
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Sat, September 8, 2007 - 7:53 AMThe narrator of A Moveable Feast.
But I guess he beat me to it.
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Mon, April 28, 2008 - 4:27 AMYou are a wonderful person, but those hobbets deserved wayyyyyyyyyyy worse for inflecting those crappy movies on the world, at least the book isn't on the tv every day, all day.
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Sat, September 29, 2007 - 11:37 PMEmma.
What a twit she is! -
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Sat, October 27, 2007 - 1:29 AMSpeaking of twits, I'd have killed off Justine from the Marquis de Sade's "Justine." He did it about a thousand or two pages after it should have happened (at the end of the SEQUEL to "Justine," if I remember correctly).
She goes running from one monastery to another begging for help, and EVERY SINGLE TIME, she gets raped and brutalized by the monks. You'd think she'd have learned not to go throwing herself on complete strangers' charity (monks or not) after the first couple of times, but NO. Buck up and get yourself a job as a scullery made or a tavern wench, already! She was just so dumb, whiney-wailey, and helpless. Like I said, talk about twits!!! -
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Mon, November 19, 2007 - 6:32 AMOoof. That damned little white girl in Uncle Tom's Cabin. -
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Sun, December 30, 2007 - 2:44 PMharry potter... -
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Fri, January 18, 2008 - 8:04 AMI second the motion -
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Wed, January 30, 2008 - 3:27 AMAtticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird." He practically shits marble.
I was tired of Shagpoke Whipple in Nathaniel West's "A Cool Million" the second I clapped eyes on him. He's supposed to be some kind of crackerbarrel archetypal American and all he affords is an example of West's fascinating paranoia about that vast land between the coasts.
Pretty much any Heinlein "old man" character is going to be full of helium, but you take them out, there's no story. Jubal Harshaw in "Stranger in a Strange Land" is the best and most lovingly-detailed, though.
Cathcart, Milo, Aarfy and the filthy old man in "Catch-22" all set my teeth on edge, but that's their whole point!
The Houyhnhnms, the idealized horse-people trotted out at the end of "Gulliver's Travels." Swift's rebuke to the Yahoos is all very well and the race embodies every virtue in the dean's scheme of values. They're also very, very self-righteous and dull.
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Mon, February 4, 2008 - 2:31 PMEveryone in Wuthering Heights, in fact i'd do it twice. -
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Thu, March 20, 2008 - 3:52 PMDITTO!
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Tue, February 5, 2008 - 11:05 AMNatty Bumpo from Last of The Mohicans, then the entire damn series wouldn't exist.
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Mon, April 28, 2008 - 1:23 PMHeathcliff from "Wuthering Heights" - never have I despised a fictional character quite so much.
Levin from "Anna Karenina" - pedantic, condescending, narcissistic. by the end, i was wishing he was going to be the one to throw himself under the train.
Peyton from "Lie Down in Darkness" - she couldn't kill herself soon enough either.
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Re: if you could kill off or get rid of any major character from any book/books/stories, who would you get rid of?
Mon, April 28, 2008 - 6:22 PMHi Oscar,
try some yoga and deep breathing, I heard it stops you from wanting to kill fiction characters
