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/lit/ - Literature

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19809904 No.19809904 [Reply] [Original]

Are there any good books about cowardice, especially novels featuring a cowardly narrator or protagonist?

Looking back at my life, it repulses me how cowardly I have behaved and the consequences of my cowardice.

>> No.19809945

>>19809904
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
>Looking back at my life, it repulses me how cowardly I have behaved and the consequences of my cowardice.
Also this is a hard thing to admit. You can still change though, and the hardest thing is admitting your faults. Good luck.

>> No.19809962

>>19809945
Thanks, will check this out.

>> No.19811256

>>19809904
flashman book series

>> No.19811351

>>19809904
Mars by Fritz Zorn. I haven't read it because it seems too painful desu.

>> No.19812360

>>19809945
based choice

>> No.19812363

>>19809904
Just read butters' post history

>> No.19812366

Maybe The Tartar Steppe by Buzzati has some of that.

>> No.19812369

>>19811351
that's a good one

maybe The Maimed by Hermann Ungar is a good choice too

>> No.19812383

You’re a resentful Jew. Read Nietzsche and stop saying your feelings about being evil make you free of anything else except trying to be happy, hating the fickle dup clown world we live in and not being obsessed with dissociation

>> No.19812393

>>19812383

There are many cowardly people who are not jews.

>> No.19812395

>>19812393
A literal retard and a sped. When did being a victim fag become normal.

>> No.19812626

>>19809945
>You can still change though
you can't, there is a certain paralyzing fear inside cowards that prevents them from ever doing anything unless ordered to. this laer leads to an overpowering apathy, but the apathy would be subservient to the fear, if one were to decide to change

>> No.19812649

Robert Walser.

His novel Jakob von Gunten entertains self-abasement, humiliation, lowlinesss, failure, cowardice. But through all that emerges a sort of contradictory light, by finding some personal power in further lowering himself into these qualities. It's very cool how he does it.

>> No.19812668

>>19809904
It's something, isn't it.
I just cemented that I'm a coward. I've always suspected.
But I can go to Syria right now, right this moment, and join a Christian militia. But I won't. I never will. Apparently I don't care because they don't look like me and it's far away, and I'm comfortable.
Damndest thing.

>> No.19812836

>>19809945

Lord Jim is the obvious choice. Conrad said something pretty interesting in one of his letters:

What you want to reform are not institutions – it is human nature. … Not that I think mankind intrinsically bad. It is only silly and cowardly. Now you know that in cowardice is every evil – especially that cowardice so characteristic of our civilization.

Varlam Shalamov in 45 Things I Learned In The Gulag says something very similar, something like

I learned that almost everyone is capable of almost any atrocity when put under even the slightest pressure. People should not be divided up into good and evil people: they should be divided up into cowards and brave men.


Another story about cowardice and growing past it:

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Ernest Hemingway