Blogocentric Formulations

Favorite Character, Favorite Novel

Day 3822: Who is your favourite character from one of your favourite novels?


Three characters immediately came to mind for this prompt, one from one of my favorite novels, one from a novel (trilogy) that I really, really enjoyed, and one from a novel (trilogy) that I have yet to finish but this character dramatically stood out in the first novel.

Mark Watney from The Martian is a great character from one of my favorite novels. I found the story of an astronaut trapped on Mars and trying to find his way home completely captivating. The character's brilliance is enhanced by his sense of humor, and the way the author walks us through his thought process from realizing he's stranded to figuring out how to survive to figuring out how to communicate to figuring out how to get home again is simply marvelous. As a reader, you get a ton of insight into this character's rational, logical thought process that you begin to believe, time and again, that he's actually going to pull of something that should be impossible, even when he has to deal with setbacks.

Sand dan Glotka from The First Law trilogy is another favorite character of mine, and I absolutely loved this trilogy. All of the characters are really well done, but none better than Glokta, who is a former handsome champion with a life of honor and heroism ahead of him, who heads off to war and is captured and tortured by the enemy, and later comes back into society as a disfigured cripple who becomes an inquisitor/torturer working behind the scenes. The character development is incredible; not only do you get a sense of all of the aches and pains and indignities that Glokta now has to deal with on a regular basis, but you get flashes of the charisma and humor that he used to have and how his current situation has twisted his view of the world but hasn't at all impacted his intellect or his ruthlessness. Glokta could easily be the subject of a semester-long character study in some undergrad college literature program.

Lady Kiva from The Collapsing Empire (Interdependency trilogy) is an absolute riot. The book focuses on the business, politics, and machinations of an interstellar civilization on the verge of change, and while many of the characters are basically playing Game of Thrones in Space, those moments are interspersed with a couple of characters who break up the "seriousness" of the narrative in key ways. Lady Kiva is basically a spoiled child of nobility who spends her time pursuing her various impulses and desires (mostly sleeping around and offending everyone's "respectable" sensibilities). It's hard to properly describe this character without going into too much detail, but I found a book reviewer who summarized it perfectly. Rogue Watson describes her as "a delightfully horny, vulgar, bisexual disaster" and, you know what? That's absolutely spot on, and it's so much fun to see a character that DNGAF running around DNGAF-ing all over the place in an otherwise serious situation.