Updated: 50 Characters Who've Stuck With Me

Way, waaaaaaaaaay, back in 2011 I came up with a list of 50 Characters who've stuck with me. It's a personal list - not, for example, the "50 Greatest Characters of All Time". Looking it over I realized I'd read quite a few of my favorite books since then, and that the list was no longer representative.

So I've gone ahead and updated it. One difference from the old list is that I include plays in this one - not just novels. Another difference is I shied away from any blatant historical characters (Claudius from I, Claudius, for example). One similarity is that I also stayed far away from any sacred texts (no Rama, for example). Without further ado - with lots of potential spoilers ahead - here are my top 50:

50. Steinbeck – Lennie Small, Of Mice and Men

“Lennie covered his face with huge paws and bleated with terror.”

The man with the child's mind, Lennie is a deeply sympathetic and tragic character. Steinbeck's laborers are all portrayed with pathos, but Lennie is not being overwhelmed by historical forces – his personal struggles are of his own actions and grasping to do the right thing.

 

49. Blume – Margaret, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret

“Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret. I’m going to temple today—with Grandma. It’s a holiday. I guess you know that. Well, my father thinks it’s a mistake and my mother thinks the whole idea is crazy, but I’m going anyway. I’m sure this will help me decide what to be. I’ve never been inside a temple or a church. I’ll look for you God.”

It’s not quite real – it’s close – but it was still a far cry better than what adolescent or YA literature had produced up to that point in time. Because of her everyday foibles Margaret is very relatable, and because of her spiritual queries, she is slightly elevated above the many run-of-the-mill heroines who succeeded her.

 

48. Saramago – The Doctor’s Wife, Blindness

“We are so afraid of the idea of having to die, said the doctor's wife, that we always try to find excuses, for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn”

The protagonist of Saramago’s classic white-knuckle tale, the doctor’s wife, navigates the world in which everyone else has lost their sight – except her. How she at times tries to blend in, and at other times has to stand out, makes for a potent allegory of the nature of humanity. But she is real enough so that, by the end, we feel a connection to her as more than a looking-glass.

 

47. Voltaire – Dr. Pangloss, Candide

“Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: ‘There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.’”

Pangloss is the dopey, ever-optimistic 'metaphysico-theologico-cosmologist'. The classic example of a muddleheaded academic, Pangloss continually preaches that this 'is the best of all possible worlds' to cheer Candide, despite the earthquakes, executions and dismemberments affecting our poor hero.

46. Nottage – Mama Nadi, Ruined

“We’d argue – fight. You’d get jealous…. We know this story. It’s tiresome.”

It’s no accident that Nottage has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama multiple times – she is one of America’s best living playwrights, and her characters are fully-fleshed, and real. The ‘detached barkeep’ is given new life in Mama Nandi in this complexly feminist, war-torn, Congolese love story.

 

45. McEwan – Briony, Atonement

“There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”

Children make excellent villains, since their minds, actions, and intentions can be so foreign and disruptive to our world. Briony is possibly the best example of this in literature, as she is just old enough to lash out maliciously, but just naïve enough to not fully comprehend the brutality of her actions until it is far, far too late.

 

44. Wright – Bigger Thomas, Native Son

“‘I didn’t want to kill!’ Bigger shouted. ‘But what I killed for, I am! It must’ve been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder….What I killed for must’ve been good!’”

One of America’s great tragic characters, Bigger Thomas’ crime is the dual-identity identified by authors like WEB DuBois: the two-ness of being both an American and black. In the era he inhabits, that identity can only spell disaster, and as he struggles against the obvious injustice we follow his tortured path of reasoning and self-justification.

 

43. Didion – Maria, Play It As It Lays

“By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.”

The incandescent glare of the L.A.-Vegas world that Maria inhabits, makes for a nerve-rattling portrayal of a woman’s torn inner life. As she glides along the razor’s edge, we feel the pulling conflict between her numbness and hyper-awareness. It’s a breathtaking and page-turning portrait.

 

42. Lindgren – Pippi Longstocking, Pippi Longstocking

“‘What does the sign say?’ ask Pippi. She couldn’t read very well because she didn’t want to go to school as other children did.

‘It says, “Do you suffer from freckles?”’ said Annika.

‘Does it indeed?’ said Pippi thoughtfully. ‘Well, a civil question deserves a civil answer. Let’s go in.’

She opened the door and entered the shop, closely followed by Tommy and Annika. An elderly lady stood back of the counter. Pippi went right up to her. ‘No!’ she said decidedly.”

Decades before other amusing, strong-willed, peculiar children (such as Calvin or Lilo) there was Pippi. An earthquake in children’s literature, she transformed expectations of kids acting like precious angels – or miniature adults – and showed them as the little weirdos they really are.

 

41. Powell – Widmerpool, A Dance to the Music of Time

“He moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.”

The boorish man who no one can stand, yet who somehow keeps rising in the world – that is Widmerpool. Throughout Powell’s epic saga it is Widmerpool who provides a sort of awful ballast. Nick, the narrator/cypher, continuously runs into the man as their fates crisscross and become somewhat entangled. We all have met Widmerpools in our lives. Hopefully some of us have managed to shake them.

 

40. Grass – Oskar, The Tin Drum

“Besides, my mama’s death had come as no great surprise to me. To Oskar, who accompanied her on Thursdays into the Altstadt and to the Church of the Sacred Heart on Saturdays, it seemed as if she’d been seeking a chance for years to dissolve her triangular relationship.”

Since The Tin Drum is the great kaleidoscopic vision of Germany directly before, during the Nazi era, and shortly after, it requires one of the most unconventional characters in fiction to portray the topsy-turvy world: Oskar. Deciding at three he didn’t want to grow, and using his voice to shatter glass, he became a template for other great 20^th century narrators (Midnight’s Children comes to mind) while remaining wholly original.

39. Borges – Ireneo Funes, Funes the Memorious

“He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho.”

Borges wasn't really known for his characters, but Funes proves a fascinating exception. He remembers everything he's ever experienced, with each moment of his life a distinct mental image from the last. How he copes with this burdensome gift presents an intriguing character portrait.

38. Carroll – The Cheshire Cat, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

“‘But I don't want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: ‘we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.’”

Alice is, for my money, the best Victorian character. But of all the peculiar people and creatures she runs into in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World few resonate, or are as beloved, as the Cheshire Cat. I think if cats could talk they'd converse with us much in the same way – uttering sparse, decisive pronouncements, before disappearing.

37. Gaiman – Morpheus, Sandman

“‘Did I hear you say that you had no intention of ever dying?’

‘Um. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It's a mug's game. I won't have any part of it.’

‘Then you must tell me what it's like. Let us meet here again, Robert Gadling. In this tavern of the White Horse. In a hundred years.’”

Morpheus – the titular Sandman of Gaiman’s epic graphic novel – has his ups and downs, quirks, and tenderness. His character is, fittingly, the most-malleable: unlike the simple two-dimensionality of many of his Endless siblings. This makes a tour of the world through his eyes particularly rich and varied.

36. Gogol – The Nose, The Nose

“‘Good sir,’ Kovalev went on with a heightened sense of dignity, ‘the one who is at a loss to understand the other is I. But at least the immediate point should be plain, unless you are determined to have it otherwise. Merely — you are my own nose.’
The Nose regarded the Major, and contracted its brows a little.”

The Nose is Gogol's most peculiar story – a man loses his nose and finds it a bread roll, followed by its putting on a suit and traipsing around St. Petersburg. The Nose acts in a manner befitting a Russian petty official, as perhaps our noses would if they had coats and boots of their own.

35. Kafka – The Officer, The Penal Colony

“‘It’s a remarkable apparatus,’ said the Officer to the Explorer and gazed with a certain look of admiration at the device, with which he was, of course, thoroughly familiar.”

As maybe the most disturbing portrayal of a cog in the system the Officer is totally desensitized to his monstrous apparatus – a device used on the condemned that, in the Officer's deluded mind, leads not only to a punishment, but a sort of grisly revelation.

 

34. Stoker – Count Dracula, Dracula

“You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!”

Dracula is a fairly chilling character. He is intelligent, but in a cunning, destructive, way. His immense powers are diverse, but he understands his weaknesses: so much so that he applies himself fully to ensuring his plans will not fail. The reader anxiously reads on to see if his cares pay off.

 

33. Wagner – Trudy, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

“I show'em this can of Campbell's tomato soup.
I say,
‘This is soup.’
Then I show'em a picture of Andy Warhol's painting
of a can of Campbell's tomato soup. I say,
‘This is art.’

‘This is soup.’

‘And this is art.’

Then I shuffle the two behind my back.

Now what is this?

No.
this is soup and this is art!”

As Trudy – the bag-lady with the alien chums – stands on the corner of Walk Don’t Walk, she regales us with tales of explaining humanity’s peculiar habits to her interstellar friends. Full of wit and wisdom, the play offers many potent observations on modern life, and Trudy, the classic wise fool, comes across as the most real character of the lot.

 

32. Miller – Batman, The Dark Knight Returns

“This should be agony. I should be a mass of aching muscle--broken, spent, unable to move. And, were I an older man, I surely would... But I'm a man of thirty--of twenty again.”

Consistently considered the most complex portrait of the caped crusader, Miller's Batman is now fifty-five, retired and struggling to cope with his former identity. His choice to put the suit back on unleashes a series of events that culminate in one of the most rewarding fights in pop culture history. Perhaps more critically it also allows for a compelling look at how we cope with who we once were.

 

31. Lowry – The Giver, The Giver

“Simply stated, although it's not really simple at all, my job is to transmit to you all the memories I have within me. Memories of the past.”

I must have been one of the first middle school classes to read The Giver and, like most since, was struck between the eyes. The last remnant of a civilization lost, he is profoundly isolated, yet this is not his principle characteristic. Rather, his sage warmth resonates as a guide into the past.

 

30. Le Guin – The Child, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

“It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible.”

The Child in Le Guin's short piece of horror will haunt you. The story could simply have been an ethical allegory, but so much attention and detail goes into developing The Child as a believable, real, character, that you, too, are convinced that you'd walk away from Omelas.

 

29. Dickens – Ebeneezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol

“‘You will be haunted,’ resumed the Ghost, ‘by Three Spirits.’

Scrooge’s countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost’s had done.

‘Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?’ he demanded, in a faltering voice.

‘It is.’

‘I—I think I’d rather not,’ said Scrooge.”

Scrooge approaches his reform like many of us, in the classic Augustinian tradition – “make me a saint, but not yet.” Using his wit as a shield he tries to parry the extraordinary sights and happenings throughout the classic, but in the end is overwhelmed with sincerity.

28. Rowling – Severus Snape, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

“…you have your mother’s eyes.”

Snape’s tragic arc (if we’re using more modern, derisive, lingo, his simping) is so totally believable. Most of us have met a figure like him in our lives – or at some point felt we could never love another, no matter what. The lifelong pining that motivates his tragedy – perhaps the most common encountered in real life – is not as grandiose as Medea’s, or Hippolytus’, or Lancelot’s. Rowling pulls off her most interesting character in the process.

27. Tolkien – Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings

“You cannot pass! I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor. The dark fire will not avail you, Flame of Udun! Go back to the shadow. You shall not pass!”

Before Gandalf the sorcerer was Merlin. Arguably, Gandalf is now seen as the quintessential wizard. His age, his knowledge, and his abilities keep us captivated throughout. Tolkien clearly depicts him as the cornerstone for the fellowship, the most respected and appreciated of all the epic's characters.

26. Turgenev – Bazarov, Fathers and Sons

“Madame Odintsov looked at Bazarov. His pale face was twitching with a bitter smile. 'This man did love me!' she thought, and she felt pity for him, and held out her hand to him with sympathy.
But he too understood her. ‘No!’ he said, stepping back a pace. ‘I'm a poor man, but I've never taken charity so far. Good-bye, and good luck to you.’

‘I am certain we are not seeing each other for the last time,’ Anna Sergyevna declared with an unconscious gesture.

‘Anything may happen!’ answered Bazarov, and he bowed and went away.”

Bazarov – the haughty intellectual torn between the nihilism of the age and his deep commitments to humanity. He is, like many on this list, a tragic figure: destined for great things with his resolutions but brought down haphazardly, inconspicuously almost, having only just begun his story. Written off as an afterthought of accident he had only just begun to make peace with his conflicts.

25. Shelly – The Monster, Frankenstein

“I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.”

Compare the above recollections, when the Monster engages his creator with the story of his flight and persecution, to that of Boris Karloff's portrayal, later inspiration for Lurch. Abandoned by his creator his struggles have us thinking his nobility is greater than that of Frankenstein's selfish obsessions and loathing for the life he has made.

 

24. Conrad – Kurtz, Heart of Darkness

“‘Oh, but I will wring your heart yet!’ he cried at the invisible wilderness.”

Not Kurtz's most famous line, but emblematic of his peculiar relation to the wilderness. Achebe has rightly condemned Conrad's work for its blatantly racist depictions of Africans; but the psychological aspect of Kurtz and the protagonist of Heart of Darkness is the reason for its classic status. Kurtz doesn't so much stick with, as haunt us.

 

23. Waugh – Sebastian Flyte, Brideshead Revisited

“I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable for, from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behavior, which seemed to know no bounds... I was struck less by his looks than by the fact that he was carrying a large teddy-bear.”

It’s hard to not love Sebastian, and his love affair with Charles set in those carefree interwar days at Oxford and Brideshead, is one of literature’s most beautiful. It couldn’t resonate so deeply, though, if Sebastian wasn’t such a perfect mix of innocence and, to use his term, “sin”. As that golden world disappears, so too the ability for their romance, and everything reverts to the ordinary, the tragic.

 

22. Christie – Hercule Poirot, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

“He talked a lot about the little gray cells of the brain, and of their functions. His own, he says, are of the first quality.”

Poirot is one of the very few fictional characters to get an obituary in the New York Times. He began as a detective of the Holmes-bent: he eventually alleviated the need for evidence almost altogether.  While he became more intuitive, though, we also learned more about him as a person – his successes and failures, loves and losses.

 

21. Atwood – Offred, The Handmaid’s Tale

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.”

Offred guides us through the inner struggles of the finest dystopia since Fahrenheit 451, in which women are relegated to second-class citizens in a far-right Christian nationalist America. Her journey, as she claws at the scraps of her humanity that’s being denied to her, is harrowing and powerful – rightfully becoming an icon in the early 21^st century.

 

20. Orwell – Boxer, Animal Farm

“I do not understand it. I would not have believed that such things could happen on our farm. It must be due to some fault in ourselves. The solution, as I see it, is to work harder. From now onwards I shall get up a full hour earlier in the mornings.”

Boxer may well be the most tragic character on this list. The allegory of Soviet revolution sees the pigs controlling the other animals, but Boxer, the worker, has blind faith in their leaders. The noble plow-horse, whose unfailing solution to problems is to condemn himself with his slogan “I will work harder!” is the inspiration to the other animals on the farm – with a grim reward. I probably think about him at least once a week.

 

19. Ellis – Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan

“Did you ever want to set someone's head on fire, just to see what it looked like? Did you ever stand in the street and think to yourself, I could make that nun go blind just by giving her a kiss? Did you ever lay out plans for stitching babies and stray cats into a Perfect New Human? Did you ever stand naked surrounded by people who want your gleaming sperm, squirting frankincense, soma and testosterone from every pore? If so, then you're the bastard who stole my drugs Friday night. And I'll find you. Oh, yes.”

Jerusalem is a punk vision of Hunter S. Thompson in a world where he got his way – all the libertarian schemes have come true in the sci-fi America of tomorrow, so that all sorts of crimes, drugs, and what-have-you is legal. And, like Thompson, Jerusalem is committed to truth via journalism, and getting people to pay attention to the important issues while their being distracted by all the shiny.

 

18. Spark – Jean Brodie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“I'm not saying anything against the Modern side. Modern and Classical, they are equal, and each provides for a function in life. You must make your free choice. Not everyone is capable of a Classical education. You must make your choice quite freely.”

Brodie is a wonderful villain, because she comes on so like a friend. She uses her power to twist and warp the lives of the girls who look up to her, and ends up endangering them in the process. Abusing her influence as a teacher, she crosses the professional guardrails that protect her students: A cautionary tale for us all.

 

17. Melville – Captain Ahab, Moby Dick

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!”

He’s a bit over the top, that Ahab. I’d just be like, “WHALE! WHALE! KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT!” But that’s why I’m not a character of classic literature. Melville made some very memorable characters – Bartleby and the rest – but Ahab, who at worst is a living personification of vengeance, is not larger than life. He is kept – just – within the bounds of reality.

16. Gilman – The Narrator, The Yellow Wallpaper

“Of course I never mention it to them any more—I am too wise,—but I keep watch of it all the same.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.”

Gilman’s story is apparently rather contentious. It was my literary introduction to feminism, and the narrator, forced to stay bed-ridden, causing her mental deterioration, made me shiver. The recognition that Victorian and Edwardian women often were amongst the most repressed in modern times comes through with a stark shudder from our narrator’s tale.

15. Solzhenitsyn – Ivan Denisovich, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“Shukhov licked his spoon clean and returned it to his boot, then put on his cap and made for sick bay.”

The lean prose of this classic was so well-crafted so as to merit a Nobel Prize, rarely given for a single outstanding work. Denisovich – Shukhov to the narrator – is a gulag prisoner whose life in the camps is one of sweat tempered by cold, hard beds and rules, and spoons kept in one’s boot. That he manages to eke out a personality in the midst of describing the wretched conditions of prison life instead of a generic scene of suffering endows Denisovich with its classic quality.

14. Twain – Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

‘All right, then, I'll GO to hell’--and tore it up.”

It would be easy to suggest, from this list, that I prefer a certain type of character: the person who must confront themselves in order to make an important choice. I would argue that most all great literature deals with this theme, whether it is deciding who to marry, how to kill, whether to be lawful, and so forth. In this sense, Huck's dilemma, that of his escape with the slave Jim, will probably no longer be encountered – it is not, perhaps, as practical a guide as some other entries. But Huck's process in his decision is one of the best in fiction, and identifiable.

13. Eliot – Dorothea, Middlemarch

“‘They are lovely,’ said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet on her finely turned finger and wrist, and holding them towards the window on a level with her eyes. All the while her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colors by merging them in her mystic religious joy.”

Woolf said that Middlemarch was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Dorothea is not a simple sketch – she does not exist as just a torn lover or a trying to reconcile her joys in life with her religious reveries. Eliot was better than that and portrays Dorothea as a very complex character who does not have all of her problems solved. Nor does Eliot leave the resolutions unresolved for shock value. Instead they are left, for that is how life is.

 

12. Kertesz – Narrator, Kaddish for a Child Not Born

“‘No’ — I could never be another person’s father, fate, god,
‘No’ — it should never happen to another child, what happened to me; my childhood.”

The breathless agita of the nameless narrator is caused when asked a simple question (we eventually discern): Do you ever want to have children? The entire work is the at times rational and at times frenzied thoughts that go through his mind as his justification for those two letters: “No” – including everything from the commonplace conundrum of struggles in love to the horror of his own childhood experience in Auschwitz.

 

11. Dostoevsky – The Grand Inquisitor, The Brothers Karamazov

“But we will gather the sheep once more and subject them to our will for ever. We will prove to them their own weakness and make them humble again, whilst with Thee they have learnt but pride, for Thou hast made more of them than they ever were worth. We will give them that quiet, humble happiness, which alone benefits such weak, foolish creatures as they are, and having once had proved to them their weakness, they will become timid and obedient, and gather around us as chickens around their hen. They will wonder at and feel a superstitious admiration for us, and feel proud to be led by men so powerful and wise that a handful of them can subject a flock a thousand millions strong. Gradually men will begin to fear us. They will nervously dread our slightest anger, their intellects will weaken, their eyes become as easily accessible to tears as those of children and women; but we will teach them an easy transition from grief and tears to laughter, childish joy and mirthful song.”

The famed story-within-a-story from The Brothers Karamazov tells of Jesus returning to earth and getting caught in the Inquisition’s snare. The Grand Inquisitor recognizes the man as the true Christ, and imprisons him accordingly – as a danger to his power and the beliefs he is trying to foster. The crescendo of his monologue can leave one shaken.

 

10. Soyinka – Olunde, Death and the King’s Horseman

“JANE: Well, it is a little hot I must confess, but it’s all in a good cause.

OLUNDE: What cause Mrs. Pilkings?

JANE: All this. The ball. And His Highness being here in person and all that.

OLUNDE (mildly): And that is the good cause for which you desecrate an ancestral mask?

JANE: Oh, so you are shocked after all. How disappointing.

OLUNDE: No I am not shocked Mrs. Pilkings. You forget that I have now spent four years among your people. I have discovered you have no respect for what you do not understand.”

Of the great works of post-colonialism, Nigerian Nobel laureate Soyinka’s masterful handling of the complexities is, to my mind, the best. Olunde, like his Sudanese literary predecessor, Mustafa, from Season of Migration to the North, travels to England and comes back again. Unlike Mustafa’s sense of hopelessness and, inevitably, indifference leading to his demise, Olunde returns and still cares – more deeply than he often lets on – about his heritage and culture. That passion will tragically conflict with the colonial world.

9. Woolf – Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs. Dalloway

“She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there--the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.”

Woolf, who praised Eliot’s efforts in creating English literature for adults, then surpassed her. Mrs. Dalloway’s inner monologue threading together the different character’s accidental meetings slowly reveals a woman who is identifiable, taken from reality rather than created for a message. It allows us to enter a sequencing of thoughts which does not seemed forced.

 

8. Austen – Fitzwilliam Darcy, Pride and Prejudice

“‘Come, Darcy,’ said he, ‘I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better dance.’

‘I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with.’”

Darcy is hard, maybe impossible, to live up to, many guys would contend. But, really, they forget that it was his faults, his pride predominately, which are examined for the first half of the book. What makes him stick is that he can be full of contradictions and still do the right thing – and that's not such a hard template to live up to.

 

7. Shakespeare – Hamlet, Hamlet

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The enigmatic aspects of Hamlet’s character have fascinated theatergoers and readers for four centuries. Is he mad, or wise? Is he in love, or just messing about? This inability to get a grip on his motivations and inner world – despite all the plays “words, words, words” – provides a keen insight into lived experience of the human condition. A great existential precursor, Hamlet’s struggles resonate as our own.

 

6. Doyle – Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet

“‘The train of reasoning ran, “Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.” The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.’”

Holmes specifically sneers at Edgar Allan Poe’s rational sleuth Auguste Dupin. Holmes initially has much in common with Dupin, though, when he puts his mental faculties to use to solve mysteries of the criminal sort. But Dupin is more a caricature, a scribble of sorts. Holmes over the years got richer and more interesting. His failings were many, and from the start. But his status as one of the world’s most beloved characters is not for nothing.

 

5. Moore – Ozymandias, Watchmen

“I did it thirty-five minutes ago.”

Ozymandias sees his fellow men through a horrifying lens of self-improvement and raw utilitarianism. His actions, or interpretations, of how to deal with the world is what makes him one of the more chilling villains ever created. The Comedian, for a point of contrast, remains troubled by his morals – whereas Ozymandias tries to solve them.

 

4. Cervantes – Don Quixote, Don Quixote

“At this point they came in sight of thirty forty windmills that there are on plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, ‘Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.’

‘What giants?’ said Sancho Panza.”

When you get an adjective created for a character’s unique combination of traits, it’s not then surprising that they’re memorable. We can’t help but feel an affinity towards the mad knight-errant, and his good-hearted nobility. From his book-induced delusions to his mirth-provoking chivalry, Don Quixote still remains one of the best creations in literature.

 

3. Lagerkvist – Barabbas, Barabbas

“Then the man had been led out to be crucified - and he himself had been unshackled and told he was free. It was none of his doing. It was their business. They were quite at liberty to choose whomever they liked, and it just turned out that way. They had both been sentenced to death, but one of them was to be released. He was amazed himself at their choice.”

Few English-speaking readers may be familiar with the Nobel Prize-winning Lagerkvist, but this portrayal is a cornerstone for his accolades. Barabbas has to grapple with his unique position for the rest of his life, and goes about doing so while seeing the emerging Christian sect develop and react to him (especially when he meets one of the disciples). His is a singular portrait that we can still identify with.

2. Tolstoy – Ivan Ilyich, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

“The pain did not grow less, but Ivan Ilyich made efforts to force himself to think that he was better. And he could do this so long as nothing agitated him. But as soon as he had any unpleasantness with his wife, any lack of success in his official work, or held bad cards at bridge, he was at once acutely sensible of his disease.”

Ilyich is (surprise!) another existential character, only his dilemma is one we all face: dying and death. While it begins as chastisement for a life poorly spent, the drawn-out process of Ilyich's demise resonates. Tolstoy's characters sometimes are a little two-dimensional (The Cossacks, many in War and Peace, and his short stories). But between moralizing in Family Happiness and musing in “Master and Man” he portrayed it perfectly.

1. Joyce – Stephen Daedalus, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“He turned the handle and opened the door and fumbled for the handle of the green baize door inside. He found it and pushed it open and went in.

He saw the rector sitting at a desk writing. There was a skull on the desk and a strange solemn smell in the room like the old leather of chairs.

His heart was beating fast on account of the solemn place he was in and the silence of the room: and he looked at the skull and at the rector's kind-looking face.

—Well, my little man, said the rector, what is it?

Stephen swallowed down the thing in his throat and said:

—I broke my glasses, sir.”

Joyce’s young Daedalus experienced childhood as I felt it. The confusion, the fear, the wonder and nervous shy quality – even in his circumstantial details, from the blonde hair to the all-boy’s school to the boarding school – I felt instant kinship. I would try and deal with the subject objectively, but Daedalus just got to me.