Top 10 Troubled Men In Literature

The Guardian:

Troubled males have always fascinated me. Nothing gets under my skin quite like a boy or a man -- or a male bear, like Rupert -- who is working through his problems, and trying to make sense of the world and his place in it. Troubled males just ring some inner bell. We all like to read about what we know."

Read the whole story: The Guardian

Comments

[mikeodd]

05:26 AM on 06/01/2010

Can't forget .Jude the Obscure...poor SOB.

[joefoss]

02:15 PM on 05/31/2010

#11
=The "consul" in "Under the Volcano" (1947) by Malcolm Lowry.

[HDR]

08:13 PM on 05/30/2010

"A hole in the shape of a woman." Great line Mr. Parsons.

[theredqueen]

10:46 AM on 05/28/2010

Fitzwilliam Darcy.

[Eric Shonkwiler]

08:38 PM on 05/26/2010

Jake strikes me as decidedly untroubled, insofar as "troubled" to me denotes some sort of inner turmoil, a struggle with oneself. In fact, I don't think any of Hemingway's protagonists outside of, off the top of my head, Garden of Eden and Islands in the Stream, are troubled in that sense. What about Manfred? There was a troubled sumbuck. Toru Okada in Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, J.A.K Gladney in White Noise, every male in East of Eden... the list goes on and on.

[Tulka2]

05:18 PM on 05/26/2010

Re-do the headline: Testosterone Poisoning.

[Eric Shonkwiler]

08:40 PM on 05/26/2010

Oh, come now. Peter Pan can hardly have any flowing through him at that age.

[Tulka2]

09:54 PM on 05/26/2010

The fetus's Y chromosome stimulates the mother's body to make and deliver testosterone to the fetus. That's what makes male secondary sexual characteristics. So... yeah... from the beginning.

[joefoss]

02:19 PM on 05/31/2010

Right on, Eric!
=What's wrong with not wanting to grow up? You could argue that Peter is a "hero" for fighting to stay true to the ideals of childhood (vs. the callousness of "adulthood"--as Ally Sheedy said in "The Breakfast Club": "When you grow up, your heart dies.")

[willisbones]

03:08 PM on 05/26/2010

Troubled males trying to make sense of the world and their place in it?

Am I permitted to move this beyond "literature" and mention Paul Newman in "Cool Hand Luke"?

I think that was one of Newman's best performances, and he was clearly a troubled man.

[FPhoebe]

07:04 PM on 05/26/2010

No, you are not permitted to do such.

:-P

[Eric Shonkwiler]

08:32 PM on 05/26/2010

No movement necessary--Cool Hand Luke is a book, as well.

[wm1066]

12:37 PM on 05/26/2010

I think Joe Bonham in "Johnny Got his Gun" was the all time most tortured. He had no arms, no legs, no face, only his brain was alive.

[elijah24]

12:27 PM on 05/26/2010

I always thought the inspector Javert from Hugo's Les Miserables was incredibly tortured. I suppose I like him because at the time when I first read the book, I was much like him. He believed in an absolute right and wrong. Law and Lawlesness.
He believed that people are what they are and can never be anything else. He was so entrenched in his zealotry, that when Veljean showed him mercy, he couldnt handle it. He would have prefered death at the hands of a criminal, than mercy from the man he had pursued all this time.

[FPhoebe]

11:39 AM on 05/26/2010

How about all the men in As I Lay Dying? Every single one of them was affected in a different way by the death of the mother, who used her dying wish as a way to eff her whole family over.

[JonathanTroy]

01:19 PM on 05/26/2010

Yes! I would add Quentin Compson from "The Sound and the Fury" and Ike McCaslin from "Go Down Moses".

[BikeFreak]

11:29 AM on 05/26/2010

The man in "The Road"...what a tortured guy!