I’m looking for novels with protagonists who are rather passive to the world around them, and the novel follows them reacting to or getting dragged into some extraordinary circumstance without much direct action on their part.
Some examples that fit this bill for me are The Secret History by Donna Tartt (in which Richard is the “normal” one of the group, and is never actually involved in the Bacchanal and ends up dealing with the fallout of the rest of the group’s actions only upon accidentally discovering what they did) and The Stranger by Camus, which has an incredibly passive main character right up until the murder. Even that first page, that first line—“Maman died today.”—is so detached from the emotional experience of losing a mother.
I’m quite interested in these kinds of stories at the moment, where the protagonist is notably not the driving force of the story and rather a vehicle through which to tell it. Please let me know if you have any recommendations that align with this! Thank you 🙂
(Can be any genre but I prefer literary fiction).
by hey515