Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   6

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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,