Do you always like book charcters?

The last time, during our English lessons, girls established the fact that “a good story has characters you can empathise with”. A bestseller called “The girls on the train” is in absolutely contradiction to this statement.

Firstly, you really hate all of characters in this book and the main character is the most antipathetic one. Sometimes you just ask yourself: do they have to be so annoying and irritating? However, it doesn’t really bother a reader, you just keep reading to know what will happen next. You want to solve a crime! Personally, I have finished this book in five hours, because I couldn’t put it down.
The story is not really complicated: there are a murder, a drunken witness and a lot of questions. It is not as sophisticated as the works of Agatha Christie but it is still a good entertainment. If you don’t have any plans for Sunday, you should buy it!

Coming back to the topic, there are some books, like these written by Joyce or Woolf, when you cannot empathise with a character. Because of the narrative mode called stream of consciousness, which show you exactly what is going on in the head of a person, you can understand their world but it will still be their world. In this case, it is not possible for reader to become somebody else and indentify completly with this character.

Moreover, Nabokov - a great writer and the professor of literature - said that strong feeling of identification with characters is just childish.