All right sleepy heads. Wake up...!!! Game timeeeeeeeee....!!!
Give me the names of your top 10 favorite literary characters... and tell me what you like about them and why.
Howard Roark [Fountainhead, Ayn Rand]
This is the hero of the novel. The purpose of writing the novel- it almost seems- is to portray the man. The story lives him... even when he is absent from the scene. One gets a feeling of breathlessness… waiting for him to come on the scene again… for HE is why the story is worth telling.
People’s reaction to Howard is always in extremes… paradoxically because he is such an extreme character himself. It is this extreme-ness in him that I adore. He is so inflexible in his dedication… so focused in his work… so inexhaustible in his walking of the path he chose for himself. His assurance, his inner poise, his serene optimism are amazing. Actually I don’t want to use the word optimism… it is the wrong word. It means focusing on the positive…refusing to look at negative. What Roark portrays is the unshakable belief that there exists ONLY positive… that evil... by definition is excluded from the world… because the universe is a benevolent place.
I find this world-view immensely empowering. It beats being worried all the time of bad things happening... of people jerking the rug off from under your feet. When it happens… we’ll deal with it… for evil is incidental… NOT to be taken seriously.
Ellsworth Toohey [Fountainhead, Ayn Rand]
Ellsworth is the anti-hero. The heroine Dominique says of him, “I love him. He is so perfect. He is a perfect blackguard. And perfection is rare in this world.”
He is also my idea of what humans are NOT. Sometimes a contrast speaks more eloquently than a statement. But there is one more reason I love him. His understanding of the human psyche is amazing. He understands in the individual, micro-level and is able to project it to the group, macro-level… and effortlessly adds the salt of mob-mentality… to arrive at a perfectly understood social machine. A machine he manipulates at will. Only, he forgot the aspect of non-uniformity in human beings… the NON- CONFORMISTs… the crazy ones… the rebels… and so he LOST.
Amazing.
Dagny Taggart [Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand]
She is the heroine of the novel and says, “Pain is not a valid reason for stopping.” All through the novel when I read the hardship she went through, this sentence went hammering in my head. I have read this book over 300 times in the past 24 years. I don’t know when I began telling this sentence to myself.
This one sentence is the essence of her. She had the ability to get up and walk on… again and again… noticing nothing but the vision ahead. To be able to keep that vision vibrant despite all odds… because it is HER vision… and her life… and because she refused to settle for less…? WOW..!!! That one sentence has been my powerhouse. Walk on Dagny… your spirit is the vision in my eyes.
Henry Reardon [Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand]
He is one of the heros of the novel. Somehow when I think of him I have this vision of a figure carved in stone… looking straight ahead. He is the embodiment of STRENGTH in the novel. He is vulnerable… with the resilience of pure steel that he manufactures. He absorbs his pain within showing nothing on the outside. Inside, the pain eats away at him… yet his strength is such that he never shows the price he pays for being the one to protect others from pain.
John Galt [Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand]
Though He comes on very late in the novel, yet once he does come, one knows that he was there all along. He is the one that gets the heroine in the end and holds all the threads of the story in his hand invisibly. He is the one who demonstrates what it means to hold a vision and to walk towards it. He also demonstrates that we don’t pay the price when we walk on our chosen path; we pay the price when we don’t. We pay by means of the shame we feel for ourselves, with the disappointment, with the loss in self-esteem. He demonstrates that a just battle is worth fighting- and dying- for… and that there is no price too big to pay.
In the end, the joy of victory justifies all the blood, the gore and all the hours of loneliness of a solitary battle. He shows that any battle for achievement is fought within the heart and mind of an individual… The battle is not waged without… but within. The engagement is not with circumstances, but with our propensity to give up in the face of adversity… in the face of the seeming endlessness of the road ahead. He shows us once the battle within is won, victory is ours. I found that enormously hope-giving. Because of him, in the midst of adversity, I tell myself Adversity is a character-builder. This quells my doubts, restores my serenity and I walk on.
Ellis Wyatt [Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand]
Ellis Wyatt is the owner of an oil-well. Fiercely independent, blessed with a violent temper, brilliantly competent and a total inability to suffer fools gladly are his key characteristics. It matches me so perfectly [apart from the violent temper bit… which has mellowed only recently] that I feel I am observing myself moving on the pages of the novel. The thing I liked best about Ellis was when he held up a finger glistening with crude oil and told Dagny, “This drop of oil is mine. MINE. Have you forgotten what that word means?” (bold mine) Tell me honestly, is there any word more filled with pride? Is there any other word that can make you feel 10 feet tall? When said by someone who has earned the right to say that about the smallest, most humble thing, it is the sweetest word in the language.
Scarlett O’Hara [Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell]
When I was reading this book, there was a point when Scarlett is lies to her sister’s beau to marry him herself. This unscrupulous behavior annoyed my strict mind… in which good and bad know their place and don’t jump into the same person. I was shocked and revolted. I remember complaining to my mom. She told me only that such is how it is and that I will begin to love her before long. And so it was.
In her own way, she was no less of a visionary. She was no less a fighter for her values… so what if her values happened to be a southern farm? A dedication like that… a tenacity of that kind… that kind of love of life… excites nothing but admiration in me. She was a silly foolish girl that I wouldn’t want my daughters to become. But if they could become the woman Scarlett became… I’ll die in peace.
Elizabeth Bennett [Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen]
Ms Bennett doesn’t need any introduction. Her loyalty to Jane, her objectivity regarding her family’s faults and her impeccable honesty to admit a mistake endeared her to me. And I loved it when she told Lady Catherine to buzz off… that she wouldn’t permit her to bulldoze her into an unreasonable promise. At the time I read the book… I was the original wimp who would have whimpered and given the promise demanded of me… and then to cry for the rest of my life… or cutting off my throat with a blunt instrument. [no Rampuri came into my life much later. MUCH. So…]
Jason Bourne [Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum]
Technically, I ought not to include the character here. It is not the character I found fascinating… but the manner of his unfolding in the novel. Even after 15 years, I remember that… though not much else.
Constance [The Constant Wife, W. Somerset Maugham]
This was a play Maugham had written on the eternal theme of a man’s unfaithfulness to his marriage vows. She has been married over 15yrs and then finds out her husband is having an affair with her best friend. She doesn’t kick up a row. Because she thinks that as long as she is financially dependent on him she has no right to. I don’t really conform to the way she handled the entire situation… even what she did later was not something I would have done.
She begins to work. After a year, she pays her husband her yearly upkeep. And then goes on a holiday with an old flame… naturally they travel as man and wife. And she tells his husband before she leaves… telling him also that she will return and continue to stay with him. Her point is… she has economic freedom… so why not sexual freedom too??
She sure was her own woman… standing tall on her conviction. Amazing.
This concludes the saga. And now the best part… I am tagging ONLY 10 people…
1. MarkIV
2. Chithrajust
3. Solarflare
4. King-Bulls-Ring
5. Swiftmove99
6. Genius64
7. Asylum
8. InkTank
9. GeetSudha
10. Manisha Bhattachrya
