The most Memorable Character in all of literature?

[andy13]

I might get some crap for this, but personally my most memorable character was Ivan Ilych.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

...Dostoevsky has been mentioned twice, but without naming one of his characters

See post no. 13


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[Seasider]

Sadie Thompson.

[Sulla]

I wouldn't pick Christ from the Bible. His dialogue is weird and he has no serious development at all.

There's plenty of Christ figures in fiction who do it better.

My pick would be R. P. McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. He's a Christ figure that fits with our times and is complicated and not always right. Plus, he's cool.

[TheChilly]

Patrick Bateman ("American Psycho")
Romeo & Juliet ("Romeo & Juliet")
Dorothy ("The Wizard of Oz")
Harry Potter ("Harry Potter" saga)
Jesus Christ ("The Bible")

[aliengirl]

A few more you should consider:

“Don Quixote” created by Miguel de Cervantes

“Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin” created by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Gilliatt

Right! I read "The Idiot" a few days ago. Myshkin's character will always remain engraved in my memory. And who can forget Don Quixote.

A few other memorable characters for me:

Milady de Winter (The Three Musketeers) by Dumas

Watson, (Friend of Sherlock Holmes). Yes, Holmes is a memorable character but I never fail to think of Watson along with him.

Hercule Poirot created by Agatha Christie. Initially I disliked the detective with the egg shaped head and with an uncanny knack for order. But he is memorable for his own peculiar ways.

Antoinette (Wide Saragasso Sea) by Jean Rheas

[Bastable]

I wouldn't pick Christ from the Bible. His dialogue is weird and he has no serious development at all.

There's plenty of Christ figures in fiction who do it better.

My pick would be R. P. McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. He's a Christ figure that fits with our times and is complicated and not always right. Plus, he's cool.

But without the Christ from the bible you would have no McMurphy as 'christ', making the original the superior, wouldn't you think? Besides, the weirdness of his dialogue and lack of development are irrelevant to his "memorability", that being the issue at hand.

[Persuasion]

Mr Poirot

Cleopatra

Mr Darcy

[country doctor]

here's a list of the 25 top characters from 1900 on, compiled by book magazine...hit the link for the top 100...there's also a list compiled of all-time characters if you'd like to google it...

http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0932846.html


Book Magazine, now defunct, compiled a panel of 55 authors, literary agents, editors, and actors in 2002 to “rank the top one hundred characters in literature since 1900.”

•Jay Gatsby, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
•Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger, 1951
•Humbert Humbert, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
•Leopold Bloom, Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922
•Rabbit Angstrom, Rabbit, Run, John Updike, 1960
•Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902
•Atticus Finch, To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 1960
•Molly Bloom, Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922
•Stephen Dedalus, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, 1916
•Lily Bart, The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton, 1905
•Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote, 1958
•Gregor Samsa, The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, 1915
•The Invisible Man, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, 1952
•Lolita, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
•Aureliano Buendia, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1967
•Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, 1925
•Ignatius Reilly, A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, 1980
•George Smiley, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John LeCarre, 1974
•Mrs. Ramsay, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, 1927
•Bigger Thomas, Native Son, Richard Wright, 1940
•Nick Adams, In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway, 1925
•Yossarian, Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1961
•Scarlett O'Hara, Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell, 1936
•Scout Finch, To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 1960
•Philip Marlowe, The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler, 1939

[Mockingbird_z]

Well, if I skip the obvious names (Brothers Karamazov, Hamlet,)
I would add
Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Benett
Douglas Spolding (Dandelion wine)

[DanielBenoit]

I would say the Hebrew Bible's Yahweh because he lies at the center of the three major religions in the West and has inspired controversy, literature, countless other works and re-workings, not least of all in the figures of Allah and Christ, who are pretty much reactions to Yahweh and the Hebrew Bible. As the saying goes, Christ hardly sneezes in the Gospels without referencing the Tanakh.

Though while Yahweh may not be as revered as Christ today (though indeed various normative interpretations of him from various books of the OT still live on) he is still, I believe, the backbone of our entire Western religious and even literary identity. All monotheistic representations of God seem to be derived from the J writer's Yahweh, from Milton's watered-down God in Paradise Lost (who is a weak character when compared to the greatly human Satan) to Michelangelo's mighty God swooping out of the clouds in the Sistine Chapel. Even Freud's hyperbole that the Yahweh is the origin of the super-ego in the West, I certainly don't dismiss the similar claim that there has never been a more powerful and omnipresent embodiment of the super-ego in literature.

I would also argue that Yahweh is probably the most enigmatic and strangest character in all of literature. I would be hard-pressed to name any characterization that is more uncanny than J's (the hypothetical writer of the best parts of the Torah). What character has inspired so many readings of this perplexing passage here?:

And the LORD said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.

22 And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel [is] my son, [even] my firstborn:

23 And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, [even] thy firstborn.

24 And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him.

25 Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast [it] at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband [art] thou to me.

26 So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband [thou art], because of the circumcision.

KJV trans

Another personal favorite passage of mine and one that has enamoured me for so long is Jacob's wrestling with a strange man who turns out to be Yahweh himself:

And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there. And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh in the sinew that shrank.

Then there is the triumphant meeting between Yahweh and Moses with his priests on the top of Mount Siani which is altogether unlike anything literature has ever offered.

9 Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel:

10 And they saw the God of Israel: and [there was] under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in [his] clearness.

11 And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand: also they saw God, and did eat and drink.

Christ of course is right there along with Yahweh as one of literatures most memorable characters (even though I am personally more moved and awed by the J writer than any of the writers of the Gospels) and I find all of his various representations fascinating, for they are about as diverse as Yahweh's; from the love-thy-neighbor Christ of Matthew to the anti-Semetic Christ of John to the Gnostic and enigmatic Christ of Thomas to the warrior Christ of Revelations.

I wouldn't pick Christ from the Bible. His dialogue is weird and he has no serious development at all.

There's plenty of Christ figures in fiction who do it better.

The so-called "lack of character development" is probably because it's a pre-novel ancient text and was meant as scripture. Also, I don't know what you mean by the "weird" dialouge. Sure the dialouge in the Gospels isn't in modern English dialect (that would be weird if it was), it's made up of sermons, soliloquies, question-and-answer bits, etc.

That said, it is arguable that there may be better "Christ-figures" in literature even than Christ himself. Indeed I am far more moved by Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin than even Matthew's immortal depiction. That said, my favorite "Christ-figure/version" is probably the Christ from the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas.

[MarkBastable]

On the radio show Desert Island Discs, the guests are asked to say which book they would take with them to the island. In the early days of the show, so many people chose either The Bible or The Complete Works of Shakespeare that the point of thing - which was to provide a hook for original and entertaining discussion - was rather dulled. So a rule was introduced that you get those two books for free, and what would your other one be?

Do you think we here at Litnet could introduce an informal convention that the Bible and the Koran don't feature in discussions of general literature? As things stand, it's inevitable that theists will cite their religious text - which, after all, they believe to be more important and more crammed to the gills with meaning than all other books put together. And atheists will tend to cite those texts in order to make their own point, which usually comes down to the view that they're not more important and more crammed to the gills with meaning than all other books, but simply part of the broad literary canon.

None of which really advances the general discussion much, but does tend to divert any thread towards a religious debate rather than a conversation about books.

[Seasider]

Once Isabel Allende, the novelist daughter of President Allende of Chile, was on Desert Island Discs and when she was told that Shakespeare and The Bible came by default said she didn't want either of them. I was so shocked I missed what she chose.

[MarkBastable]

Once Isabel Allende, the novelist daughter of President Allende of Chile, was on Desert Island Discs and when she was told that Shakespeare and The Bible came by default said she didn't want either of them. I was so shocked I missed what she chose.

Indeed. The woman's an idiot. You're going to need something to start a fire with.

[DanielBenoit]

Do you think we here at Litnet could introduce an informal convention that the Bible and the Koran don't feature in discussions of general literature? As things stand, it's inevitable that theists will cite their religious text - which, after all, they believe to be more important and more crammed to the gills with meaning than all other books put together. And atheists will tend to cite those texts in order to make their own point, which usually comes down to the view that they're not more important and more crammed to the gills with meaning than all other books, but simply part of the broad literary canon.

I don't know if you're referring directly to me or not but note that I am indeed not a theist and that I do not think that even something like the Torah is "crammed to the gills with meaning than all books put together".

Also, why not discuss religious texts as literature? To ignore the literary importance of these works is to ignore a great part of literature because they are so immensely influential and vital to the "canon".

I think the problem lies in people having to get rhetorical over things, I simply cited what I thought was the most memorable literary character in literature, I wasn't advertising my religion or something because I have none.