10 Antiheroes in Literature That We Love to Hate
“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. “
Jay Gatsby; The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ah, so. Gatsby. Kind of obvious, I know, as a literary antihero, and yet (now that the annoying ubiquity of movie-related Gatsby think pieces is finished) I still feel like he deserves a place on my list. And that’s maybe because, for me, I refused to see him as an antihero for a long time. Why? Well, yes, he was a liar and crook and pretender and, eventually, accomplice to manslaughter. But he was all those things because of love. There was a time when that seemed noble to me. Hey, I was fourteen once too! Now, of course, it seems kind of pathetic. But it’s still impossible to hate Gatsby, because of how goddamned hard he tries. Sure, he does terrible things, and ultimately dies for those things and for that love of his, but in the meantime he was striving in an earnest way that makes me uncomfortable to even think about. He dreamed big and watched it all disappear. Even if you don’t love him, it’s hard to totally hate him.