There are no doubt fictional protagonists more reprehensible than the main character of Dave Fitzgerald's Troll (Humbert Humbert comes to mind), but most of these do not necessarily consider themselves morally blameworthy–they are often self-deceived or simply blind to their own shortcomings. The unnamed protagonist of Troll (not quite the narrator) knows very well that he is an impossible jerk; being an asshole is, in fact, at the very core of his identity, the condition to which he relentlessly aspires in order to give his life purpose. Although occasionally we get fleeting glimpses of the better person he might have been (but probably can no longer be), his role in the novel is to perpetually demonstrate his lack of concern for others or, if he does momentarily try to reassert some latent dignity, to inevitably revert to a fundamental boorishness he can't suppress,
This strategy of character development is a fairly radical move at a time when "likability" in characters has been elevated to an inviolable principle among readers (and too many writers) of fiction, even more so in a novel of more than 500 pages in which the protagonist is really the only important character. Fitzgerald should at least be given credit for chutzpah in this effort, but in fact the very audacity of his extended exposition of objectionable behavior is itself compelling and gives the novel its own kind of narrative drama ("will he ever wise up?). For those who value fiction that unsettles expectations of the form rather than reinforces the reader's self-contented comfort, a novel like Troll provokes us to reflect on the relationship between reader and character in fiction: can we hold the character in contempt and still enjoy the writer's way of creating the character? We would not likely want to interact with the protagonist of Troll in real life, but a novel is artifice, an illusion summoned through language, and to judge such a character by degrees of "likability" seems an unnecessarily restrictive perspective on the value of a work of fiction.
Often a novel featuring a morally dubious or otherwise unsavory character confronts us directly with this character through the use of first-person narration. (Again Lolita comes to mind, or Celine's Journey to the End of the Night.) Simple proximity to the character through extended, intimate acquaintance with the narrative voice can deceive us into overlooking the character's more deplorable qualities or to seize on those better qualities we think we perceive beneath the surface of the character's literal actions. We are in effect tricked into feeling some affinity with the character, perhaps to later learn the depth of our gullibility. Fitzgerald denies himself the use of this trick in favor of what seems an even more brazen one: Troll directly implicates us in the actions of its protagonist by adopting second-person narration. This presumably would imply that we should restrain our impulse to despise the narrator because we too might share some of his human flaws. Except that such an interpretation can't really encompass passages such as this:
Your attention to hygiene is close to laughable. You bathe only when you've accumulated a noticeable filth, deodorize only when you can actually smell yourself, and brush your teeth only when they start to hurt (a task which reliably makes your ill-defined bicep sore before you reach your back molars). Your razor makes but cameo appearances, usually after your beard has already overgrown your neck and invaded the softer allopatrics of your chest hair. . . .
This still seems to be the representation of a particular person, so particular that surely most readers would find it difficult to regard the character as a kind of Everyman figure close enough to themselves that they could be included as his shadowy surrogate simply through being addressed as "you." The better account of this novel's point of view would take it as a kind of internally split perspective: The protagonist addresses himself in the second person, perhaps to avoid fully claiming the behavior related, as would happen with a first-person narration–perhaps it is the protagonist-as narrator's only way of maintaining his moral scruples in the face of the evidence he presents of moral degradation. While some of the protagonist's errors–most conspicuously his immersion in the worst excesses of online culture (thus the most immediate derivation of the novel's title) and his slackerly wallowing in the mindless comforts of pop culture–are certainly shared widely enough by some in the protagonist's generational cohort, satire of our current cultural follies, although present, is not the novel's exclusive ambition. Its protagonist is finally not a cautionary figure only.
Is the online troll purely a product of the ubiquity of online culture, a creature summoned through the simultaneous visibility and anonymity it allows? Were these creatures always already out there, waiting for this opportunity to show themselves? Or has the internet in its assorted varieties simply created them ex nihilo? In some ways the protagonist of Troll is a quintessential troll, trollish online and off-, but while his behavior finds its specific expression in the forms promulgated by the wired world, surely it is not simply the product of those forms. Online culture has given him the opportunity to postpone adult responsibility, to waste whatever writing talent he might possess on a clickbait factory called GRUNDL, where he composes the lists of top ten this and top then that of the sort that blights online discourse, and to inhabit porn and dating sites where he might indulge his libidinal inclinations without ever much encountering actual women in person (when he does, the encounters work out terribly, especially for the women).
It seems unlikely that this character would have turned out to be an accomplished writer, or even a well-functioning grownup, if the internet hadn't screwed him up. We might say that Troll shows us exactly how current electronic media warps vulnerable personalities, or how easily it can do that, but at its core the novel is the story of a failed writer and would-be intellectual with poor social skills who really doesn't even seem to get much pleasure out of his self-indulgent profligacy. He might seem to belong to the line of modern antihero protagonists, except that there's really nothing "roguish" about his actions. He does stay true to his antisocial disaffection, but this is because finally he can't resist giving in to his worst impulses. Even after he apparently does come to a final reckoning with the fatuity of his life at the end of a long essay he writes as a farewell to his readers at GRUNDL, he can't avoid further perpetrating an entirely gratuitous offense against public decorum that nearly gets him killed.
The quality of thought and style on display in this farewell essay (the longest but not the only sample of the protagonist's writing incorporated into the narrative) suggest that the protagonist is capable of sustained analysis and not without writing skills. Indeed, the writing throughout Troll (which is wholly consonant with what we find in this essay, again suggesting the authors are one and the same) is fluent but colloquial and often pungent, and is finally the main reason why this long novel about an unpleasant character continues to reward our attention. It is part of the protagonist's dysfunction that he devotes his critical efforts to evanescent pop cultural distractions such as the tv show, Friends, but the accomplishment of Troll is to make this dysfunction artistically functional.
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