The Character Who Others See Differently: The Excellent Bren Cameron

One of the few ongoing very long series that I read is C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner series. The main character, Bren Cameron, starts as a kind of ambassador whose primary job is to "translate" human culture into the atevi culture of the planet where the humans landed generations earlier. Eventually, Bren becomes the ambassador for the primary atevi leader who maintains a precarious political dominance over most of the other clans. 

It is a fascinating series. The summary above doesn't do it justice.

Bren is a great character. He is tall by human standards though by atevi standards, he is about the height of a young teenage boy. By the beginning of the first book, he has reached the point where he thinks in terms of the atevi language; he is also beginning to think of terms of the culture, to think like an atevi. 

He is well-aware that he is human. The wiring is not the same. Yet he is also aware, to a degree, that he appears almost foreign to many humans. His facial expressions and attitudes and ways of assessing problems take him outside human culture. Because he is brilliant, he is able to constantly evaluate any decision or problem in terms of a dozen different scenarios from an outsider's perspective--to both Atevi and humans. 

And he doesn't realize he is brilliant. Or he does and doesn't think his brilliance is enough. In one book, the human spaceship--whose return in the first book sets Bren's future career in motion--takes Bren and several others to a human space station to unravel the political situation there. In one scene, Bren behaves in a very human way with a human he doesn't trust. The act is a ruse though in the moment Bren is thinking on his feet. He isn't aware of his own genius in handling the situation. 

And the author doesn't call attention to his genius (unlike Ngaio Marsh, who is always reminding readers how intelligent and unique and socially adept Inspector Alleyn is). In fact, it is entirely possible that the author sees Bren has just one more smart human among many. Since so much of what we see and experience is through Bren's head, it is easy to accept his evaluation of himself, to go along with his self-castigations when he thinks he has made errors in judgment. 

The approach here isn't easy for a writer to maintain--to allow characters to perceive themselves as different from how other characters perceive them. The writing issue isn't the same as the unlikable character who is justified. In that case, the justification is often quite blunt. Justifying the witch or Grendel or Dracula is part of the text.

In this case, action and occasional dialog have to communicate: 

The character thinks, This is who I am, but....