The Unheard, Unliked Character

On A-Z List 3, Fantasy, I review The Wizard of Oz. It is not one of my favorites, and I actually rather dislike the nightmare-image-inducing book. 

However, the character of the witch reminded me of a common approach to characters--to write about the REAL character, the one suggested between the lines or, for that matter, completely misunderstood by the original author. 

There's a long tradition of such approaches. In some cases, the villain is explained, such as Grendel. In some cases, minor characters come to the fore, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or the Fool in Shakespeare.

Sometimes, the unheard or misunderstood character is used for political reasons. More often, however, I find that the unheard or misunderstood character is being explored for fun! Years ago, when I taught an Intro to College course, I had my students write essays based on role models. In one course, they had to use role models from Tolkien. I was completely okay with them using villains, so long as they made their arguments.

So I got essays about Sauron being able to delegate and Smaug being detail-oriented. 

Great stuff! 

My favorite character of this type is Dracula from Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape. I like it so much because while Dracula defends himself and comes across as not-so-bad, he doesn't utterly lose his core personality. He is still rather wry, interested in history, a tad ruthless, intelligent, and so on...

He blames a number of deaths on Van Helsing too eagerly using "modern" techniques (like blood transfusions) without fully understanding what he is doing. 

Otherwise, when he takes blood, he says, "So, I took a little blood! What of it?!"

Saberhagen went on to write a few books with this Dracula solving cases alongside Holmes (who may in fact be a distant descendant).