Top Ten Tuesday
Top Ten Tuesday is a bookish meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.
This week's topic is:
The Ten Biggest Jerks in Literature
1. In Jane Austen's Persuasion, jerks do abound. The main character, Anne Elliot has an appalling family. Her father, Sir Walter, takes the number one spot on my list. He is stupid, stuck-up, and a crashing bore.
2. Also from Persuasion, Sir Walter's cousin William Elliot. Cad.
3. From David Copperfield, Steerforth, who seduces and abandons Little Emily.
4. Fred Vincy of Middlemarch, who eventually redeems himself.
5. Anse Bundren from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Much of the dark humor in the novel arises out of this character, but in the end he is a self-serving old vulture.
6. Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby his casual brutality, his sense of entitlement, his deeply stupid nature make this guy a jerk.
That's all I can come up with folks-jerks should be easier to find. But villains seem to be more prevalent in literature than plain old every day jerks.
9 comments:
I also had trouble separating out the villains from the simple jerks but Austen seems to be a master at creating these jerk characters.
I only have one jerk character from Austen: Mr. Collins. He's not evil, but he's such a stuck-up bore that I had to include him on my list.
I have read As I Lay Dying, but it's been a really long time, and I wasn't blogging then, so I don't have any reminders.
Read my list here.
@Red-I think with a little time and thought, I could have done a top ten jerks list composed entirely of Austen's minor characters.
@LaCoccinelle-Collins is a consummate jerk! He definitely belongs on this list.
@LBC-Time for a reread of As I Lay Dying! Faulkner novels deserve at least two readings.
i love your picks from persuasion. i love that book but it does have some of the most awful characters in austen. lucy steele of sense & sensibility also comes to mind!
It's no surprise to find so many of Austen's characters on people's lists--she really did include a lot of jerks in her books. Totally agree about Tom Buchanan as well--he kind of gets forgotten when it comes to thinking of jerks but then when it comes down to it Gatsby himself was kind of a jerk.
Casual brutality. A perfect description of Tom Buchanan. Could not agree more.
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