Character Study No. 8 Bob Dobbs

Bob is an amoral man with possibly the emotional maturity of a young boy. Bob does things because they feel good. Bob does things because he can. Bob does things for praise and appreciation.

Bob is not trustworthy. Bob may have killed every noble feeling he ever had. Bob is the kind of person who walks through the world untouched leaving a storm of wreckage and ruined lives behind him.

Bob is not a nice person. Even Bob finds himself irritating, annoying, even cruel?

Bob has bad habits, Bob is a bad person, if anyone ever knew how many stupid, foolish, chemical-assisted or otherwise things Bob has done in his life, Bod wouldn't have any associates at all.

Bob is an animal, Bob is growing meaner with age.

Can anything stop, suspend or correct Bob's path?

This is the kind of character worth writing about.

Only trouble that appears to remain is this: with such an awful character as this, who would want to read about him?

He's a great challenge to write, but nobody could accept such a character at face value.

Bob is a destroyer. Bob will only betray his associates. Bob himself, in the introspective sections of the proposed narrative, would examine his own descent into, for lack of a better word, pedestrian evil, and be momentarily horrified; not because he equals the evil men who are his peers but because he falls so far short of them yet apparently remains incapable of being good.

Such a character would be heaven unchecked to write and worse than hell, a mediocrity, to read.

What am I to do with such a creation? For the sake of society I should make Bob disappear, move him to a villa in Tuscany near Sienna and solitude, so he can live out his fictional life removed from the major currents of other people's lives, perhaps for his sake too? Or is such a niche too good for the likes of what may be just another worn out stereotype?

In creating Bob, I wanted to create a character that I would find challenging and intriguing to write about, yet in so doing I have both succeeded and failed.

This character is not worthless, how much more the pity, a truly worthless character is endearing.

This character is stubborn and childish and a betrayer.

This character deserves nothing, but will get his story told in the end.

But no one will read it.