The creation of a false personality

In response to, and borrowing from, those much more intelligent than I...

At the heart of the matter seems to first discovering exactly what makes one a villain. Chekhov, which Elizabeth and Sam have already pointed out, deals not with bigotted gang-raping serial killers but ordinary people with sinful flaws.

Frank O' Connor, talks about the creation of a false personality (using Chekhov as an example) and examines which acts make one evil. "We are not damned for our mortal sins, which so often require courage and dignity, but by our venial sins, which we can more easily conceal from ourselves and commit a hundred times a day till we become enslaved to them as could be to alcohol and drugs. Because of them and our facile toleration of them we create a false personality for ourselves - a personality predicated on mortal sins we have refrained from committing,ignoring altogether our real personality which is created about the small, unrecognized sins of selfishness, bad temper, untruthfullness, and disloyalty" (The Lonely Voice, 87-88).

He uses "The Duel" as an example of how a characterwho believes they are righteous because they have notdone anything atrocious (genocide, rape,etc.). "Interms of Christian ethics Laevsky is incapable ofcommitting a mortal sin, but the venial sins hecommits all the time are infinitely more destructivethan any mortal sin could be because he can suppressthem from his conscious mind and go on believinghimself to be a man of honor, a cultured man, aliberal, and a humanitarian, while in reality he isnot even a decent human being" (92).

I think a larger issue becomes whether violence itself may be fully justified. Travis's story, for example,uses the final act and the build-up in some ways to try and explain the rape. The rape functions as a commentary on US/Africa diplomacy and in terms of the actual plot, the reader can understand at least on some level why this character is willing to commit this act. After reconsidering previous comments to the contrary I think this is the ending the story needs to have because it jerks the reader and also provides a violence consistent with what the story demands.

In William T. Vollman's Rising Up and Rising Down:Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means,he tries to explain perspectives, allegiance, and sympathy for violence. "The ultimate position of Rising Up and Rising Down is that moral values can be treated as absolutes in some respects, as relative quantities in others. I believe that every violent act refers itself back to some more or less rational explanation. To the extent that explanations are irrational, they can be quickly disposed of. To the extent that they are rational, they do enjoy the possibility of absolute status, provided that ends,means and the intellectual-moral logic in between have all been correctly assembled"

He goes on to explain: "On the other hand, any violent act may be supported by one plausibly absolute construction of justifications - for example, defense of homeland, with all the attendent logic just referred to - and invalidated by another, say defense of authority. One of the many tragic cases of this disjunction is the civil war which ruined Yugoslavia.Authority's federalism, which just happens to have a Serbian flavor, mobilizes its defensive violence against Croatian defense of ethnicity and localism.Here is where the relativism comes in.In short you have the right to make up your own mind as to whose cause was more just, that of Croatia or that of Yugoslavia."

All villains obstensibly have motivations which make them interesting. Iago wants Othello dead. Tony Montana wants to rule over Miami and so forth. The problem comes in when some action is done outside these general goals. Why smash an old rival over the head with a bowling pin when it seems that you have in fact already drank their milkshake?

It seems to me there are always justifications to do wrong. If the reader cannot understand them, then it becomes a fault of the writing. The villain has to be understood on some levels or they lose what makes them interesting. Writing about random or unconnected acts of violence becomes distracting, tiresome, and boring after a while, no matter how grandly conceived.

[originally posted by Ryan Davidson]