Stuck On a Desert Island with Whom?

So I was catching up on my radio podcasts from MPR and one of the episodes that caught my eye was called, "Who is your favorite Literary character?" Okay, yes, well, that's hard because I have so many, Harry Haller, Josef K., Sherlock Holmes, Edward Rochester, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Maud Bailey, or even Esther Summerson from Bleak House, but then it turns out the topic is a bit trickier. The show focuses on that old desert island ploy - and asks, "With which literary figure would you like to be stuck on a desert island?"

That is such a different question! I love all the characters above, but could you stand to be on an island with any of them? I mean, those dark, brooding Byronic men - they are delicious, but it would get old really fast to have them constantly smoking opium and singing paens to the daemon muse. That pretty much cuts out all the vampires of current pulp fiction and all my favorite German characters.


What a delightful party to have Harry Haller (the depressed Steppenwolf), Josef K. (the accused from the Trial) and Leo Naphta together at your island dinner party. The conversation might go something like this:

Me: Well did anything exciting happen today?
Harry Haller: The day went by just as days go by. I killed it in accordance with my primitive and withdrawn way of life.
Me: That's so exciting, Harry...
Josef K.: I was just thinking I should take over my own legal defense...
Mr. Darcy: Really, Josef, I am SO tired of your obsession with your trial! I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself.
Leo Naphta: And you, Fitzwilliam leave this bourgeois drivel, ... a sign of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy, the end product of civilizaton...
Maud Bailey: So, what, we're friends now, is that it? I know this is an awfully repressed sort of English thing to say, but what the hell ...?
Edward Rochester sits there brooding silently.
Harry Haller: You are all making me long for my fiftieth birthday when I will kill myself...

Harry Haller

No, these are not the types of people I would like to be stuck on an island with (no matter how much I love to read and reread their stories.) And although Sherlock Holmes is brilliant, he'd become tiresome so very quickly! No Dr. Watson I!

Forget the Shakespeare characters - would you really want to spend months (or even hours) with Hamlet, King Lear or Richard the III?

I love the Jane Austen heroines, but Emma would get really annoying fast (She'd probably try to set up Esther Summerson and Mr. Darcy and all that shyness of Esther would really grate on the nerves too! And would Elizabeth Bennett really be a good companion?


Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Effi Briest, Hedda Gabler, and even Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov don't seem like very sanguine conversationalists - no I think one would have to find characters from a comedy to spend lengthy amounts of time with.

I was thinking Robinson Crusoe might be a really fascinating person to spend some time with (plus with all that island experience, I bet he could be really useful around the hut.) But when push comes to shove I decided that the most entertaining and fun person to hang around with would be Lord Illingworth from Oscar Wilde. He is a mature man in his forties and not so idealistic and silly as Jack Worthington, nor as Foppish as Algernon Montcrief. He would be entertaining and adult, a fascinating conversationalist and wit and dinners on the island would be a delight. As he remarks in A Woman of No Importance, "A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world." (Or at least keep one amused on a desert island!)