Negative and pozitive characters

[lauris]

Do you find negative characters more interesting than positive ones?Lets discus about that,shall we ? :banana:

[MsSilentia]

A complicated negative character can be far more interesting than any positive hero. But if the character is just described as bad, evil, perverse etc without any attempt to complicate or understand its motives – then at least I consider it usually just cheap or lazy.
I have a problem with authors trying to describe the thoughts and feelings of characters they do not like themselves. It shows!

But of course – who does not like Moliere’s Tartuffe? But all the same, you do not wish him to be successful in his manipulations.

I have a very complicated favorite by the Swedish author Hjalmar Gullberg. It is “Doctor Glas”. It is translated into English with the same title but I do not know if he is much known outside Sweden.

It is from the early twentieth century and is about a physician who falls in love with a female patient. He wishes to help her from an unhappy marriage, not to marry her himself but to enable her to marry a lover. He ponders the option of killing her husband and as a reader you follow his thoughts about moral, law, responsibility and so on. His own infatuation with this woman is not the only complicating thing in this discourse. Another is his great loneliness. It is very fascinating and Gullberg refuses to comfort the reader with a nice or proper ending.