Oh yes Maldoror, but Lautreamont's monstrous hero does rejoice in his evil and gloats throughout the poem. So he must be happy in his own unique and unhappy way.Originally Posted by Anymodal
Oh yes Maldoror, but Lautreamont's monstrous hero does rejoice in his evil and gloats throughout the poem. So he must be happy in his own unique and unhappy way.
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
Javert has my vote too. I mean: To have all of that marvelous intuition of his and to still become a futile slug in the face of the True Law - this is about as wretched as it gets, if you ask me. And the most wretched thing about it is that this sort of character walks our streets everyday, thinking he has everything - from the motives of everybody around him to the universal code of conduct - down to a science. I think Javert has one of the truest suicides in all of literature. His pathology and everything that was going on in his mind was conveyed to us so dreadfully accurate that his suicide became extremely convincing. To have your whole career and state-of-mind shattered like that? That's just appalling! Javert is the most wretched character in all of literature - in fact, almost every character in Les Miserables was wretched. That's why the book is so great! HUGO!
Well Job is reduced to a wretched physical state and if (as I believe) someone who wanted a happy end had not altered the book then it would be shorter and his physical wretchedness even more apparent and more realistic. But there are wretched characters scattered throughout literature - Catch 22 has them; The Orchard Keeper and Child of God has them; Hardy wrote whole novels on them. Wretchedness is part of the human condition into which we can all fall and from which we can scramble or be pulled so it is not a wonder that there are so many examples to find.
Ophelia was pretty wretched, driven to madness and suicide by her dalliance with royalty...come to think of it her whole family was pretty star-crossed to have been a part of Hamlet's little family drama. Pops gives his life in service to two kings and is stabbed and stuffed in a closet for it...son is brought home from a promising career abroad to seek vengeance only to find himself on the wrong end of his own plan...and sister takes a swim.
Last edited by Dono; 12-07-2013 at 11:37 PM.
Many of the characters created by László Krasznahorkai could be described as wretched. János Valuska becomes a wretched man in The Melancholy of Resistance; Grigory Korin is likely both insane and wretched in War & War; every single character in Satantango.
Peter Kien in Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé seems unaware of his own wretchedness at times, but he certainly cuts a wretched figure.
Budai from Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole.
There are so many wretched characters in literature, they are not hard to find.
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