Psychotic Main Character?

[reiver33]

Has there ever been a sympathetic main character who was a psychopath? Generally speaking they have all been monsters of one form or another, unfettered by any sense of moral or ethical restraints.

The reason I'm asking is a story idea which grew out of yet another dream. In this dream Frasier and Niles Crane were on the trail of a serial killer, but on unearthing the third grave unleashed something which could cover its tracks by changing reality (it gets a bit complicated after that). So the storyline I have is...

- - -​

Who built the Reality Engine - or why - is unknown, but at some point it decided to hide in the past.

However its past is our present.

The Reality Engine can tap into the collective unconcious, and thus knows when we think about it.

And then we don't.

Only those individuals divorced from the rest of humanity - psychopaths and egocentric madmen - can know of the Reality Engines existence.

And no one listens to them, do they?

- - -​

The inference in the above is that psychopaths don't share in the collective unconcious, which is either a symptom or cause of their condition. So, could such a character hold a narrative together (American Psycho notwithstanding), given that if any normal person learns what he knows, the Reality Engine will become aware of this? You'd be talking about a small group of seriously twisted individuals trying to cooperate for their mutial good. Or killing each other, just to be on the safe side.

So, can madness of this kind ever be sympathetic?​

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

Sympathetic? Not outside their own circle, I don't think. Pitiful, yes. But not sympathetic. Sympathy entails a state of pity worth granting sorrow towards and a desire to help. True psychopaths are beyond help, beyond reason, and therefore while pitiful are not deserving of sympathy. This is nothing to say of eccentrics or neurotics, which merely have strange idiosyncrasies or less monstrous bouts of insane behavior. Neurotics are not as cold and distant and truly "lost" as true psychopaths are. Neurotics have a conscience and a stop point, so as such are deserving of sympathy.


A true psychopath, however, can never be considered anything less than an abomination and therefore shunned. There is no treatment for psychopathy. There is no cure. Psychopaths feel absolutely no love for their fellow man or indeed, any other living creature, and never consider a single consequence to their actions. And, worse yet, they feel everything they do is right because of that lack of conscience. They love only themselves and will do anything to better their position whether it be through legal, illegal, sane, or insane means. In short, nothing stands in a psychopath's way and they even do sometimes go out of their way to perform actions against those they truly hate, actions that would be considered worthy of their being committed by normal society. They aren't just simply the downtrodden, the ostracized, the unfairly shunned. Psychopaths are dangerous, insane, and deserve no toward feelings by any member of sane, polite society.

 

[mygoditsraining]

Has there ever been a sympathetic main character who was a psychopath?

They wont be truly sympathetic, but then this is fiction and the way you present your characters to the reader can warp that. Taking American Psycho as the example, there is the base level of psycopathy as a metaphor for the emotional emptiness of yuppie culture. He is literally empty, and he has to fill his narrative with minituae in order to give some semblance of dimension to his life.

The twist is that the minituae are fascinatingly detailed descriptions of high value, vanity items. Bateman's shopping list is to die for, and Easton Ellis generates a kind of vicarious sympathy for Bateman simply by tapping into our desire to consume.

The kicker is that he turns it round on the reader later in the novel. You wanted to be this a hundred pages ago, it seems to say as he engages in murderous, cannibalistic excesses that are as grotesque as his lovingly-described morning routine. This was the life you envied.

So, uh, yeah you can use a psychopathic character(s) in your story, but you should think about what the metaphor means - what are you trying to say about the collective unconscious (about society, normality, our place in the world) when the person who stands against the hidden threat within it is so completely broken?

Also, as a writer you can have some fun with the idea of a psychopath, as he/she will be the ultimate unreliable narrator. Manipulative, calculating, and intelligent, what agenda could your main character be pushing at the reader by recanting a revisionist, even fantastical history?

 

[J-WO]

To my understanding, psychopathy isn't so much a binary ,yes/ no situation so much as a scale of extremes. A lot of psychos are predominantly psychotic but have a stunted, suppressed conscience choking beneath all that nasty. A good fiction example is Dexter from the books and TV series of the same name. In fact, a great many serial killers get sloppier as they go on because, on some subconscious level, they're desperate to be caught.

If the plot of your story slowly makes the main character realize that their not 100% psychopathic and realise the virtue of their nascent and retarded conscience, then that's a great character arc. Especially when contrasted with a villain who embraces his beast 100%.

 

[Toby Frost]

Depends what you mean, I'd say. Realistically it's like saying "Can I have a sympathetic dictator?" As J-WO suggests, you probably could engineer some pity (poor little guy, having to hide underground while all his friends desert him!) but as soon as you looked at it in a truly realistic way, taking everything into account, he would simply look like the villain he was.

I suppose the arch-example is Dr Lecter. He isn't sympathetic, ultimately, because he goes round murdering people. However, if you wished you were really brainy and somewhat arrogant and were obsessed with how chic Italy is, he would have something of a wish-fulfilment quality. I suppose there's potential for black comedy here, along the lines of Serial Mom. The closest thing I can think of to a genuinely sympathetic serial killer (and not just an entertaining one) is the Michael Douglas character in Falling Down, although he is more a reasonable man who has been driven berserk.

Basically I think it would be very difficult.

 

[Boneman]

Rambo..?

 

[J Riff]

Yo, Rambo.... Hmmmm... thing is, Mr. Psycho might just be pretty dull. Just like anyone else, y'know? So's one doesn't get caught. Normal, dull. Plain and ordinary, like this writing..Sucha person would gravitate to online chat rooms and forums, and just gab away making himself seem like mr. nobody-in-particular....gathering information ... and then he would strike! But I can't imagine anyone wanting to slay SciFi/Fant fans, can you?

 

[gadgetmind]

How about Ae in Stone by Adam Roberts?
Ian

 

[Ursa major]

I've only seen the first two seasons of the TV show, and haven't read any of the books, but I found Dexter Morgan to be sympathetic** in the former.

I'm not sure whether Dexter is a psychopath*** - apparently his TV character begins to diverge from the one in the books - but he is a serial killer (albeit of the means-justifies-the-end sort).





** - I very much doubt I'd think the same of a real-life Dexter.

*** - As J-WO points out, he is atypical in a number of ways

 

[MeriPie]

Seeing as psychopaths are by definition unsympathetic, having no empathy and no understanding of societal/moral values etc. etc., you would probably have a lot of trouble with one as the main character. It would be a seriously difficult exercise, and to make it work at all you'd have to study a lot of psychology books on the subject. Instead I'd go for having a psychopath as a secondary, but prominent, character. Then you get to explore that aspect of your plot but without all the problems with describing something through someone so disconnected. Have you read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime? People with Asperger's Syndrome or autism aren't anything like as damaged or disconnected as psychopaths, but that book just demonstrates the difficulties of having a mentally ill narrator.

Instead, you mentioned that other kinds of people would also be connected to it? Fight Club and A Beautiful Mind both have brilliantly sympathetic schizophrenic main characters... Or are you not so interested in that because it's been done before?

 

[Boneman]

Mad Max?

 

[Vladd67]

Tom Ripley?