One of the open debates in current reading times – in everything from casual book club conversations to literary agent circles – is how unlikeable a protagonist can be. The old-school rules instruct us that a story centers around a hero who undergoes a journey from innocence to experience. The antagonist is a supporting character, creating barriers and obstacles to the hero. The antagonist may be central to the plot, but the emotional arc isn’t about him.
Contemporary commercial fiction is grappling with the rules. For the most part, they stay the course, finding dozens of creative ways to keep plotting fresh.
Amy Dunne starts off Gone Girl as a supporting character: the missing and presumed dead wife of narrator Nick. It appears that he is guilty of doing something horrible to her. We learn of escalating domestic violence in excerpts from Amy’s journals. And then – spoiler alert – it turns out Amy staged her own kidnapping to frame Nick. She left a mostly fictional diary behind to help the police.
Depending on how you look at it, Gone Girl is either a conventional narrative or a subversion of it. If Nick is the protagonist, he undergoes a journey from the woman he thinks Amy is to who she really is. Amy is the antagonist. Nick is not terribly sympathetic, though, so the rules are still being messed with.
Another way of looking at it is that Amy is the unreliable, and unlikeable, protagonist. Giving Nick the opening narration is a trick to disguise what the story is really about: Amy’s manipulation of him. It has never been written that the character opening the story need be the protagonist.
Some authors subvert the rules entirely. Kaira Rouda’s Best Day Ever is one of many Gone Girl knockoffs. The narrator is a sunny guy taking his wife for a weekend to their lake house on Lake Erie. It slowly becomes clear that he is a narcissist and, more alarmingly, a sociopath. His wife is in danger and doesn’t know it.
Here we have a subversion of the standard plot. The protagonist is a monster and the main supporting character is his victim. There is a twist at the end, but not enough to alter the roles in the way Gone Girl does.
Somewhere in the middle of all this is Joshilyn Jackson’s Never Have I Ever. The protagonist, Amy, is a scuba diving instructor living with her modern family in Florida. She has a best friend, an adorable baby, and a husband and teen stepdaughter. In the opening scene, she attends a book club meeting with the local moms. A new neighbor, Roux, cajoles the group into playing a few rounds of a secret-revealing game. Amy is uncomfortable and certain that Roux is baiting her.
Amy has a secret. And as it is revealed, she begins to walk the line between likeable and not. Roux is a good antagonist to balance this out. She is a slightly contrived character who acts as an external conscience for Amy’s guilt, a kind of human telltale heart. In the end, Amy’s remorse keeps her on the hero’s path.
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