When you really stop to think about what’s happening when you’re reading a novel, it’s weird.
You are essentially using the words on the page to co-create a fictional world in your own head. Your guide is either a storytelling voice if the perspective is omniscient, or the guide is an anchoring protagonist in first person or third person limited. You only see what your guide helps you see.
In first person and third person limited, you are more a less a conjoined twin with the protagonist, only your fictional other half controls all the ambulation. If you want to go exploring, the guide must take you.
This really puts a premium on the characteristics of the reader’s guide.
Protagonists don’t have to be “likable”
Whether a protagonist needs to be “likable” is a perennial flash point in the writing world, one often shaded with cultural biases that ascribe the desirability of certain characteristics based on gender and race, among other things.
As any number of anti-heroes show, a protagonist doesn’t have to be a good person. They do need to be sufficiently interesting and/or engaging that the reader wants to spend six or more hours with them, and it helps if they don’t do something “beyond the pale” where they “lose” the reader.
But here’s an underrated quality: they need to be a good guide as they move through the world of the novel.
Are they a good proxy? Do they largely take the reader where they want to go? Are they curious about the things we’re curious about, and do they pull those threads?
Frustrating guides
Few things are more frustrating than reading a story where the reader is several steps ahead of the protagonist. It’s extremely tedious to wait for a protagonist to painstakingly get up to speed on what we already know.
Sometimes this happens when a writer makes a protagonist dumb or lazy in order to preserve mysteries (also called an “idiot plot“). Other times the protagonist is inactive and passive, which makes the reader feel like we’re on a long drive in a car that can’t get out of neutral.
In other words, if the protagonist is stuck because they’re dim, incurious, or don’t have the will to go after the things we’re told they care about, the reader is absolutely going to feel stuck too. We want to get on with it and move through the world and solve the key mysteries, but we depend on our guide to take us where we want to go.
I wouldn’t get hung up on “likability.” I would think about whether the omniscient voice or the protagonist has the right qualities to be attuned to what the reader might want to explore.
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Art: Chemin montant dans les hautes herbes by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
The Catcher in The Rye was the first novel I read wherein the author presented an unlikeable protagonist. And did an excellent job of it. Like so many people, I hated and loved it.