I should probably raise this with my therapist, but instead I’m just going to write about it here.
On both page and screen, I’ve always been drawn to characters who have no clue what’s going on. There’s something both comforting and thrilling about sitting on the shoulder of a fictional character who is bewildered about the world around them.
To clarify, I’m not talking about fictional characters who are simply challenged by the need to solve a mystery or a puzzle. Such a challenge is commonplace in fiction, of course, and one would be hard pressed to argue that Sherlock Holmes, for example, was bewildered or confused about the world around him.
No, I’m talking about something less common and more elemental: fictional characters—especially protagonists—who struggle to understand the world or their place in it. It’s one thing to follow a fictional hero who is supremely capable and confident (a James Bond, say, or a George Smiley); it’s quite another thing to follow a hero who’s totally baffled.
Arguably the grandfather of bewildered protagonists is the legendary Josef K., hero of Franz Kafka’s 1925 masterpiece, The Trial. K.—so confused that he has only an initial where his surname should be—is a lowly bank administrator who is unexpectedly arrested by two officials from an unidentified agency. Famously, neither K. nor the reader is told what the charges are, and (spoiler alert) this bizarre state of affairs persists throughout the novel.
The result is a deeply strange man-versus-machine tale in which the reader is left feeling frustrated about the apparent unfairness to our hero, and confused about the illogical behavior of a faceless government. From which we get the term kafkaesque, of course.
I’ve always felt there’s a Josef K. quality to Ryder, the protagonist of one of my favorite literary novels, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 oddity, The Unconsoled. Ryder is a concert pianist who has just arrived in an unidentified central European city to give a recital. We follow him over three days as he gets waylaid by multiple distractions, never quite sure where he is or what he’s supposed to be doing. The result is a bizarre, dream-like experience, and it’s instructive to note that the working title of the novel was Piano Dreams.
The Unconsoled is not only one of the strangest novels by a contemporary writer but also one of the most divisive. Many critics hated it, one even suggesting that it should be burned. (That overreaction is a little less funny now that we are in a phase of numbskull legislators banning books in a monumentally stupid echo of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451.) If you haven’t read The Unconsoled, I suggest ignoring the controversy and allowing yourself to get caught up in its extraordinary trip.
Josef K. was perhaps not the first bewildered protagonist. Kafka was undoubtedly influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and it’s arguable that the world of The Trial drew on some of the Russian master’s work, including his classic 1846 novel, The Double. Its protagonist, a ‘titular counselor’ called Golyadkin, may or may not be bewildered for the good reason of suffering from mental illness. But things start to get very strange when he meets his spitting image, also called Golyadkin.
Although the two Golyadkins are friendly at first, the original Golyadkin soon realizes that the newcomer is cooler, more popular and more successful. Worse still, the new guy starts to take over his life, with terrible consequences. Richard Ayoade’s 2013 movie version, starring Jesse Eisenberg as both Simon James and James Simon, is admirably odd if not entirely successful.
On the small screen, I felt the influence of both Dostoyevksy and Kafka in the brilliant and woefully underrated STARZ show, Counterpart, which somehow manages to be both a gritty spy thriller and a parallel reality sci-fi tale at the same time. J.K. Simmons is superb playing both versions of Howard Silk, one a timid clerk and the other an ass-kicking secret agent.
Timid Howard is so bewildered that he works for decades in the same office while having no clue about what the organization does or even the purpose of his own job. It’s fascinating to see the pieces fall into place in his head as the show develops. And cool Howard’s disdain for his hapless other is full of Golyadkin vibes.
Talking of spy thrillers, no list of bewildered protagonists would be complete without the wonderful James Wormold, hero of arguably the best of Graham Greene’s ‘entertainments’, his 1959 thriller Our Man in Havana. Wormold is a struggling vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba who—desperate for money—accepts an offer from British intelligence to become an informant. But providing actual intelligence seems too much like hard work, so he invents fake intelligence instead, including by making sketches of vacuum cleaner parts and telling London they’re the plans of secret military bases.
The joy of Wormold is both that he’s clueless and that he knows it. He assumes his ridiculous reports can have no parallel to real life, and doesn’t care as long as the paychecks keep rolling in. So things get very strange and very funny when real life begins to intertwine with his fake intelligence.
Our Man in Havana has received a curiously lukewarm reception from some critics over the years, usually because it’s considered too silly for a spy thriller. But it’s based on Greene’s own experiences working for MI6, and it works because the spycraft details are not just ridiculous but also realistic.
The protagonist of my debut novel, Citizen Orlov, makes a nod to all of the above. There are elements of K., Ryder, Golyadkin, Silk and Wormold to be found for readers attuned to the bewildered.
Orlov is an unassuming fishmonger working in the unnamed capital of an unnamed European country at the end of the first world war. Passing the Ministry of Security on his daily constitutional, he innocently answers a phone call (through an open window) and is given a life-and-death message to deliver to an Agent Kosek. When he sets off into the ministry to look for Kosek, Orlov gets mixed up with a group of new recruits and finds himself sent on assignment to protect the king from assassins.
Along the way, Orlov encounters a hapless band of revolutionaries, an alluring belly dancer who’s also a spy (based on the real-life Mata Hari), and two hotels that confuse everyone on account of having almost exactly the same name. When he realizes that someone in the government is plotting to assassinate the king, Orlov has no idea where to turn or who he can trust. The deeper he gets mired in machiavellian plots and counterplots, the less he understands about what’s going on.
In fiction-writing school, they tell you to give your protagonist agency. You hear that word a lot. If your hero has agency, the reader will relate to the character and follow them intently. I decided to honor that advice by doing the precise opposite. Because there’s a special place in my heart for the bewildered protagonist.
I invite you to join me in following a guy who has no idea where he’s going.
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