Embattled Truthseekers: the Persecuted Protagonist: Guest Post by Eliot Pattison

Character over plot is a mantra often heard in writing seminars, emphasizing the point that it is characters, not plot, that drive a novel‘s success. Ray Bradbury even suggested that “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by.” Engaging novels require engaging characters, but the novelist uses plot to thrust tension onto those characters, developing them by besieging them. Plot should never be considered a gimmick or mere tool. The well-done plot and its backdrop become intrinsic, vital to the metamorphosis of character that lies at the heart of the tale. A plot’s unique tension may derive from micro, intimate dilemmas or range through macro social and ideological forces, driving vastly different takeaways for the reader. Orwell’s 1984 would have been a dramatically different novel if the protagonist Winston Smith had been suffering from being spurned by a lover instead of his resistance to a soulless totalitarian state. Few tension builders are as gripping as this dynamic of a character being persecuted by ruthless, omnipotent adversaries. 

I chose persecuted protagonists for both my fictional series. In the Skull Mantra novels my main character is a disgraced Beijing investigator exiled to Tibet who finds justice for oppressed Tibetans despite being battered by authorities whose job it is to destroy the Tibetan identity. In my Bone Rattler series the lead character is a Scottish doctor exiled to the American colonies for his connections with Jacobite rebels. Burdened by a forced servitude that denies him any rights, he resists his own bondage while seeking justice for native tribesmen, slaves and other orphaned people of the colonies. The ongoing persecution of these characters steadily increases the stakes as they stalk the trails of murderers. Corrupt judges, spiteful army officers, oppressive party commissars, vengeful tribal warriors, ruthless policemen, and sadistic aristocrats ambush these characters as they seek answers that those in power conceal. Importantly, the ordeals that shape them are not simply caused by barriers to their quest. They are targeted with dire personal jeopardy, often being arrested, even tortured, and must defy government to discover the truth. Adding to the tension is the recurring possibility, sometimes a direct suggestion, that the physical and mental cruelty they endure will sap their humanity. That omnipresent threat and the self-doubt it precipitates present new layers of stress, driving both plot and character. How, the novels ask, can these bludgeoned characters preserve their courage and integrity when faced with such suffering? As Nietzsche poignantly reminded us, “whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster.” These protagonists are constantly dancing with monsters. 

A less obvious but potentially profound aspect of the persecuted protagonist novel is the platform it provides for illuminating the persecution itself. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a well-known example, exposing the horrors of the Soviet gulag system while following a tormented protagonist who has been wrongly sentenced to forced labor. Stephen King’s novel Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption reveals penal system corruption as it tracks a wrongly accused prisoner who overcomes years of adversity inflicted by the authorities to find a makeshift resolution. Readers may be driven by empathy to join the protagonist’s journey but along the way they will learn much about the forces that cause the suffering. My own Skull Mantra series casts a spotlight on the abject human rights abuses underway in western China. No one picks up such a novel in search of a human rights chronicle, but the reader absorbs bitter lessons about those abuses by walking alongside my lead character. More than once I’ve had readers tell me that although they had previously read reports on human rights conditions in Tibet, they had never really understood that oppression until they read these novels. 

Mystery fiction lends itself well to such tales, for it can take the reader inside the head of the oppressed, a perspective seldom available in traditional factual reporting since most victims are silenced by their oppressors. These are the truths that are hard to come by—and often readers don’t otherwise know the questions to ask to reach those truths. Ultimately these characters cannot be separated from their persecution—and that is the real power of these books. The novels set the hook early by describing the protagonist’s suffering then pull their readers into deeper waters, prodding them to think about the human condition in unfamiliar ways. This is what Francis Bacon meant when he told us long ago that “Truth is hard to tell. It sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.” The persecuted protagonist invites the reader to become a truthseeker. 

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Eliot Pattison’s nineteen novels include the award-winning Skull Mantra series and the Bone Rattler series, which explores the complex people and events leading to the founding of the United States. For more info, visit eliotpattison.com.