Please suggest a book where the main character does something really bad..something that society would likely deem unforgivable. They weren’t forced to do this horrible thing. I’m not talking about a situation where they kill innocents to save humanity. What I mean is they simply made a bad choice. But are a good person at heart and eventually gain acceptance and/or forgiveness.
by teepee-bear
2 Comments
I was going to suggest Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. The subject matter is heavy, and feelings about the main character are complex. It doesn’t fit with your last sentence, as I don’t believe forgiving the MC is the point of the book, but you get a sense that perhaps he was different and therefore ostracized and wronged by his society, and that factored into his choices.
I was gonna suggest some Palahniuck or Alice Sebold but idk if I know anything that’s gonna jive with that last sentence either. But Alice Sebold “Almost Moon” is about the main character kind of accidentally kind of not so accidentally murdering her elderly mother who she cares for in what seems to be a fit of temporary insanity brought about by mental and emotional exhaustion and the rest of the book is her trying to cover up the crime and deciding if she should run towards the border. I mean the book is about a lot more than that but that’s the actual like story structure of it.
Palahniuck has lots of tragic characters that seem to do really fucked up things for reasons they don’t even fully understand but can definitely be attributed in some way to deep mental illness and past traumas. The main character with a traumatic childhood in the book “Survivor”, for example, happens to now have the old phone number of a defunct suicide hotline that has stickers all over pay phones in bars and places. When he gets tired of the calls, sometimes he gently pushes the person in crisis to just go ahead and do it. And that’s far from the only fucked up thing he does and even that is worse than I’m letting on here. Still the character is fascinating and tragic, one of the only survivors of a famous suicide cult where the adults were being more than questionable with the youth. Idk if I would say any of these characters are redeemed though. I guess it depends on what you consider redemption. I think the reason may be that just because a person starts off as good, sometimes it’s not just one bad decision or mistake. Sometimes one leads to another and another. In essence, good people can become bad people, and there’s so much grey in between. I think it’s an uncomfortable truth about life a lot of us don’t like to think about. We want the good person who made the wrong choices to have that redemption, but sometimes, they just get what’s coming to them, consequences of their actions.