The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Part One in Which the Blogger Contemplates the Usefulness of Questionable Narrators, and Defends the Readers Who Love Them I read an opinion somewhere that people who can like a book with a morally bad main character are themselves bad people. That is a very narrow minded way to look at literature. If you avoided bad protagonists, you wouldn't have books like American Psycho, The Catcher in the Rye, or the book that I just finished: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.
The White Tiger is about a poor servant from India who murders his master and becomes an entrepreneur. Don't worry, no spoilers, because Balram, the protagonist, tells us so within the first few pages. The rest of the story is about how he gets to that point, and what lessons can be learned from it.
Of course, the entire novel is somewhat clouded by the fact that Balram is not really a nice person. He tries to hide it because the story is told in first person, but this just makes him seem greasy. I find this kind of character study facinating, because it's almost a horror story. You are peeking at the action through covered eyes. This kind of fascination with the macabre is echoed through the novel with many characters reading a smutty murder magazine.
Throughout the novel, Balram continuously tries to prove to us he is a good person, but each time he does he reminds us that his entire family was likely murdered because of his actions. And he contradicts himself by telling us how much his master did not deserve to die, but how necessary it was to kill him.
Plus there is an entire subtext to The White Tiger that lies in the unsaid. Balram is presenting us with his best version of himself, and to do that he is leaving out some key moments in his life. Every once-in-a-while, they peer through though. For instance, Balram refers to his master as his ex multiple times through the story. He never really clarifies what he means by this, but there are some tender moments shared between the two men, and the passionate way in which Balram murders Ashok make me think Balram means something more than just ex-employer.
Overall, books with questionable narrators work well to make the reader think "Could I have done what Balram did? Am I that kind of person?" And more often than not, we balk at the thought and become more comfortable in our docile lives. So I would disagree completely with the thought that immoral narrators breed immoral readers: As Balram himself notes, "Just because the drivers of Delhi are reading Murder Weekly, it doesn't mean that they are about to slit their master's necks. Of course, they'd like to ... You see, the murder in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want to be like him..."