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Post by toomuchchanmin on Jan 31, 2016 11:46:03 GMT
I was reading Hamlet, and I thought about Hamlet's descent into insanity. Hamlet is the main protagonist of the story, and we kind of know what is going around in his head through his monologues. However we don't know if he is really mad or just acting sometimes.
Then I thought about last year's story: The Great Gatsby. The story's protagonist was Nick Carraway, who literally carried away the story. However he is a bit hypocritical, saying his father thought him not to judge anyone in the first page of the story, then he goes around judging every single character in the story.
Can you think of any other stories carried away by unreliable stories?
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Post by mohahaha on Jan 31, 2016 12:00:32 GMT
I'd think that Don Quixote is an unreliable protagonist, since he's role is just to aid and serve others as a noble knight. But the people's point of view is that a knight at that time is "late" and it's very unlikely seeing someone adventuring across the lands to helps others. Giving the people the idea that Don Quixote is insane.
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Post by Jonathan on Jan 31, 2016 13:51:29 GMT
I was also thinking about Don Quixote someone like Hamlet. They are very unreliable and look both mad to me. Another unreliable character is the mother in the story of the Yellow Wallpaper. We read this last year and I found it very weird. The mother was in a old mansion so that she can have some fresh air. She writes journals and hides it from her husband. She is half crazy and starts ripping out the papers from the wall and refuses to open the door for her husband. He bursts in in the end to find the horrific scene and faints. The mother just goes around his fainted body and the story ends.
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Post by mayurika98 on Jan 31, 2016 14:21:20 GMT
I agree that Hamlet is a very misleading character. I often get confused by whether he is just acting to be crazy or just being himself. Most of Shakespearean plays have unreliable protagonists. For example in Romeo and Juliet, we cannot just predict the future and figure out the story through Romeo and Juliet's actions. The story heavily depends on some other crucial characters such as the friar and the parents of both Romeo and Juliet. This is a tactic that Shakespeare uses for us to see different perspectives of Romeo's and Juliet's love story. In the end, we are aware of what both characters are doing but they are not aware themselves.
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Post by melody on Jan 31, 2016 17:16:33 GMT
Agreeing with Mohaha (I don't know who that is), Don Quixote is definitely not a good protagonist that we can rely on. It's actually really hard to see stories that has a protagonist character like Don Quixote since these days, most of the protagonists on stories are pretty plausible and smart who knows how to understand other characters. However, stories that came along time ago, there are some insane, weirdo protagonists who are not trustworthy enough. At this point, I would include Hamlet being a weirdo protagonist as well. Just like Mayurika, I get confused if he's mad or just being himself, but I think he (himself) has a mad part of his personality.
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Post by lucia on Feb 6, 2016 13:38:45 GMT
I agree! The story is kind of hard to follow because there's nothing really certain about Hamlet and whether he's actually insane or not. I also think it's hard to relate to a character like Hamlet because of his indecisiveness and inaction. (He's also very whiny.) However, although the character itself is hard to relate to, his honesty about what he's going through and his predicament make his character pretty compelling.
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Post by christopher on Feb 7, 2016 11:18:07 GMT
Hamlet makes us raise questions about his true intentions. It's a struggle to read about an unreliable protagonist who is indecisive and mad-not-so-mad kind of style. I agree with Mayurika that we should infer to other characters in order to figure out the story and make an educational(?) guess about the protagonist itself.
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Post by Jooyoung on Feb 7, 2016 12:30:14 GMT
Haha well I find most protagonist in the stories we've read unreliable. Gilgamesh was unreliable because he was a little over sentimental and selfish about immortality. Beowulf seemed like an overly ambitious, arrogant, I-Want-Fame person. Gawain wasn't very brave and ended up lying. The only character I remember to be truly noble was Rama from Ramayana.
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Post by ETypeRegymon on Feb 7, 2016 12:58:54 GMT
To add to Jooyoung's point, I think the reason main characters are flawed/unreliable is to make them more interesting. It can be fun seeing the flaws of the hero give them trouble that they need to overcome (or fail to overcome, like in Hamlet and Beowulf), while a perfect hero would just win without any issues. The thing with Rama is that he was supposed to be the ideal man that every guy should strive to be, so I don't think giving a role model flaws is a good idea.
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Post by juliaj on Feb 7, 2016 13:34:30 GMT
I agree that Nick Caraway is a good example of an unreliable protagonist. There is also Humbert Humbert in Lolita and Christopher Boone from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. All these characters are unstable in some way and have a twisted view on the world. They are very strong in their stances and that leads them to be unreliable because they are so biased. They might be aware that what they are thinking or doing is wrong, like Humbert Humbert, but they may not like Christopher Boone. Hamlet is more on the side of not knowing. However, these kind of protagonists makes the story all the more interesting.
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Post by anniee on Feb 14, 2016 13:03:08 GMT
Another story that we read this year with a controversial protagonist is the character Beowulf from the story of the same name. At first, we expected Beowulf to be the typical perfect hero as in other cluncoolic stories, yet I thought his fatal flaw - his arrogance - was of a higher level than of other heroes that we have seen. In the tale, we were able to see evidence of Beowulf's arrogance beyond the plot: when Hrothgar's jealous son was with Beowulf, he told the story of which Beowulf and his friend dared each other into doing something foolish. They could have died from their competition, but both boys did it anyways because they were to proud to back down and admit defeat. Also, though Beowulf had to take care of his kingdom as an old man, instead of letting his men fight the dragon, he rode into battle himself against the beast because he wanted the gold kept in its lair. We usually only see the fatal flaw trait causing the one final downfall of the protagonist, but Beowulf's ego is prevalent throughout the story, which I thought was comparable to that personalities of other main characters.
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