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S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
06
Alcoholism in Literature
(Severely Sozzled Characters)
Abe North
—
Tender Is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Failed musician with a propensity for getting his friends
caught up in dangerous trouble. Abe gets robbed at gunpoint
while drunk, accuses the wrong man of the crime, and ends
up bludgeoned to death in a speakeasy.
✖ ✖ ✖
Michael Henchard
—
Th
e Mayor of Casterbridge
by Th
omas
Hardy
“Hay-trusser” who becomes so soused he sells his wife and
daughter at a country fair for fi ve guineas. Penitent, he swears
off alcohol for good and goes on to become a successful mer-
chant and mayor of Casterbridge. Th
en his wife and daughter
show up and ruin everything. His fi nal wish is to be forever
forgotten.
✖ ✖ ✖
The Whisky Priest
—
Th
e Power and the Glory
by Graham
Greene
Nameless and deeply fl awed, not just with alcoholism but also
lechery and cowardice, because
Greene was making a point
about the inviolate nature of the holy sacraments, regardless
of how contemptible the character in the robe happens to be.
Th
e priest is chased all over Mexico and eventually gets a
happy ending, but only so you can also catch a glimpse of his
arrogance.
✖ ✖ ✖
Pap Finn
—
Th
e Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
Regularly beats the stuffi
ng out
of one of the Western
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Canon’s most beloved protagonists. Ghostlike, disheveled,
and typically “drunk as a fi ddler,” he even tries to steal Huck’s
reward money, which the poor kid spent the entire last third
of
Th
e Adventures of Tom Sawyer
earning.
✖ ✖ ✖
Sebastian Flyte
—
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Literature’s most famous lapsed Catholic. Flyte drinks either
out of guilt over abandoning the
church or repressed homo-
sexuality or some combination of the two. None of this is
presumably helped by the constant presence of his handsome
agnostic school chum Charles, who narrates and eventually
falls for Sebastian’s sister. After Sebastian gets kicked out of
the university, everyone gives up on him,
with the lone ex-
ception of his darling stuff ed teddy bear, Aloysius.
✖ ✖ ✖
Julian English
—
Appointment in Samarra
by John O’Hara
Depressive, womanizing Cadillac dealer who self-destruc-
tively, and somewhat inexplicably, stumbles toward his inevi-
table rendezvous with death. Th
e protagonist is almost as
unlikable as John O’Hara himself,
a man who spent his en-
tire career alienating other writers and demanding a Nobel
Prize. Julian commits suicide via carbon monoxide in the
end, while O’Hara, despite the lack of a Nobel, passed away of
natural causes, inscribing for himself the modest epitaph
“Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time.”
✖ ✖ ✖
Elwood P. Dowd
—
Harvey
by
Mary Chase
A perfectly sane fellow with plenty of disposable inherited
wealth, a fondness for midday martinis, and a best friend
who happens to be a pooka, a terrifying Celtic faerie that
usually takes the form of a giant black horse.
In this case,
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