ck: But many okay novels, even good ones, are
about self-absorbed characters whose stories are
told by, self-absorbed first-person narrators--the
writer's alter egos. And why not? There's no rule
demanding that a novel be about others, no rule
that people be "imagined" vs remembered or
composited, like organic fertilizer, I guess.
Self-absorbed characters can only take a novel so
far. _The Fall_ and _Lolita_ work, I think,
because Camus and Nabokov know more and feel more
than their narrators. My unschooled take on
narcissism--please correct me Carol--is that a
narcissistic personality organization lacks that
transcendence, that empathy, and in extreme cases
(the NPD Irene mentioned) narcissists treat people
only as objects, and become increasingly
grandiose, withdrawn, and isolated as they grow
older. Like Humbert Humbert, but unlike Nabokov,
there is no one else there, no real Lolita, for a
narcissist.
We agree that there's no clay tablet of inscribed
rules for novels, but I think characters have to
be imagined or they can't be re-created on the
page. (We may be quibbling about semantics here.)
Also there's the notion of plot, the conflict of
competing desires, which have their best
expression when more than one character embodies
them. Finally, there's the notion of
identification. If the reader doesn't have
sympathy for the narrator or protagonist, if you
don't really care about the struggles of a book's
narrative center, the hero if you will, then why
read? And narcissists--who dismiss others, don't
listen, lack empathy--would seem to be at a
disadvantage in bringing about audience
identification.
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