/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22518020]

Who is the smartest character in literary fiction?

[Anonymous No.22518058]

>>22518020

Satan

Second would be God

[Anonymous No.22518070]

Socrates

[Anonymous No.22518089]

>>22518020
Judge

[Anonymous No.22518218]

>you've seen people doing archery before right?
>yeah, yeah, senpai a bunch of times
>because we'll look really stupid if you get this wrong
>don't worry, I'm an expert at drawing people doing archery. That's the bow and arrow thing right? It's easy, I can't go wrong

[Anonymouṡ No.22518242]

>>22518020
Given /lit/'s obsession with IQ, I'm surprised there isn't an official ONE HUNDRED MOST INTELLIGENT CHARACTERS IN LITERATURE chart. It should be possible to compile one. Ordering them strictly might be impossible, especially if we start including immeasurables (YAWEH from the Old Testament?) but never mind about that.

A few random suggestions:

Hannibal Lecter (Red Dragon, etc)
Alicia Western (The Passenger & Stella Maris)
Judge Holden (Blood Meridian)
Hamlet (Hamlet)
Mycroft Holmes (The Greek Interpreter)
C. Auguste Dupin (The Murders In The Rue Morgue, etc)
The Patrician (Discworld novels)
Leonard Of Quirm (Discworld novels)
General Cummings (The Naked And The Dead)
Tom Bombadil (The Fellowship Of The Ring)
Sophy & Toni Stanhope (Darkness Visible)
George Smiley (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, etc)
Thomas Cromwell (Wolf Hall, etc)
Wolf Larsen (The Sea Wolf)
Samuel Hamilton (East Of Eden)
Orr (Catch-22)
Seymour Glass (A Perfect Day For Bananafish, etc)

[Anonymous No.22518255]

Akagi Shigeru

[Anonymous No.22518256]

>>22518089
>>22518242
If the Judge is so smart, why does he hang around in the middle of the desert with a bunch of illiterate cowpokes?

[Anonymous No.22518273]

>>22518255
not lit

>>22518020
If we need to put a greek character, I would choose Athena.

>>22518242
I would add the typical detectives from mystery genre. Like Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot.

[Anonymouṡ No.22518292]

>>22518256
Why not? Plenty of very high IQ people have done similar things. Do you think T. E. Lawrence was stupid because he hung around in the middle of the desert with a bunch of illiterate Arabs?

Judge Holden is pretty closely based on a real individual. My guess is he (the real one or the fictional one) took up with Glanton's gang because it gave him a chance to rape and kill, which he enjoyed doing. Also he had a chance to sketch things and so on. He might well find that life more interesting than sitting in some university surrounded by half-smart academics. Just because Glanton's gang were mostly uneducated didn't mean they were stupid. (They clearly weren't, if you read Chamberlain's account.)

[Anonymouṡ No.22518318]

>>22518273
>I would add the typical detectives from mystery genre. Like Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot.
I put Mycroft Holmes rather than Sherlock because he's supposed to be more intelligent, just too lazy to use his ability. Poirot might make the cut, yes, although AC isn't a good enough writer to do a high-IQ character really well. (Peter Wimsey might be preferable.) I had Dupin, who's the template for all these super-intelligent detectives.

[Anonymouṡ No.22518362]

>>22518070
>Socrates
Tricky — is he a real person or a literary invention of Plato (perhaps based on a real person)?

The other tricky candidate is one who's potentially super-intelligent, but impossible to assess. Take the Cheshire Cat for example. My gut instinct is to put it in the 170-190 range. But I could be wrong.

[Anonymous No.22518421]

>>22518362
if he was invented by plato how come that one fag made a play about him

[Anonymous No.22518433]

>>22518256
>tfw 2 smart to participate in the gold rush

[Anonymous No.22518473]

>>22518273
Sherlock Holmes isn't really smart. I've read some of Sherlock's stories and his "deductive" skills (its actually "inductive" desu) shouldn't work that well. He (almost) never gets stuff wrong and his inductions are borderline guesses. Statistically, he shouldn't guess so many things correctly.
It's fake intelligence bullshit

In this respect, Akagi Shigeru is smarter and held in a higher regard

[Anonymous No.22518489]

>>22518292
Smart people do smart people stuff. What does the judge do that's so smart? He run a business? Invent shit? Write a poem?
Lawrence, who is hardly the smartest person ever, was just a british officer obeying his orders, and Prince Feisel was hardly an illiterate.

[Anonymouṡ No.22518491]

>>22518421
He was certainly a real historical character. But the question is whether we're treating the Socrates of the Dialogues as a fictional character. (A fictional character can be based on a real person.) If not, he's not really eligible.

[Anonymous No.22518496]

The protagonist of Mein Diary Desuein by Anon

[Anonymous No.22518507]

>>22518020
Odysseus is a clever leader but far from smart

[Anonymous No.22518524]

>>22518242
Here use this:
https://www.writingtoiq.com/
Just plug in quotes from the characters and go

[Anonymous No.22518564]

>>22518473
>muh ACKSHUALLY it's *in*ductive not deductive

OK reddit, then what is Sherlock if not smart? Yes, he seems almost one-dimensionally omnipotent in his ability to solve cases, but he is
>literally thinking on a higher level than Lestrade or Watson
>makes connections that other people don't >makes practical use of esoteric knowledge that only he possesses or bothered to study (types of cigar ash, what different aspects of footprints imply, etc.)
>i.e. he's able to identify what seemingly unrelated knowledge is able to be applied to cases
>displays an incredible amount of social/emotional intelligence (tricking a guy into giving him info by making it a bet, woos a maid just to get the layout of a house)
>has superior memory
>able to solve somewhat complex cyphers

Unlike the copypasta about BBC Sherlock, literary Sherlock is intelligent to a sometimes superhuman-seeming level, but he is not *superhuman* He has also made enough mistakes that he's not just a Gary Stu. See: A Scandal in Bohemia, Yellow Face, Orange Pips (where someone dies because of his mistake)

[Anonymous No.22518634]

>>22518020
Probably some Pynchon or DFW character.

[Anonymous No.22518636]

Anarsuimbor kellhus

[Anonymous No.22518845]

>>22518020
If we're excluding sci-fi/fantasy characters that have godlike knowledge and perception (Leto II from Dune, Severian from BOTNS, Kellhus from Second Apocalypse) then realistically Hal Incandenza or Hannibal Lecter are the smartest /lit/ characters.

[Anonymous No.22519136]

>>22518473
>He (almost) never gets stuff wrong and his inductions are borderline guesses.
Literally Akagi Shigeru but without the "(almost)", remember that Akagi Shigeru plays a mostly RNG game (I've gotten to Master in Mahjong Soul, the only thing that differences people in higher levels is RNG).

[Anonymous No.22519156]

>>22519136
Yep, that is because real mahjong with stakes ultimately boiled down to psychological warfare

[Anonymous No.22519528]

>>22518564
You also only read about Sherlock's line of thought from what is relayed to Watson which often glosses over the dead ends and discarded possibilities.

[Anonymous No.22519801]

>>22518020
Algernon and it's not even close.

[Anonymous No.22519807]

>>22518218
I fail to see what is wrong with the pic

[Anonymous No.22519809]

>>22518273
If you want to include Sherlock you need to Include Arsene Lupin

[Anonymous No.22520301]

>>22518020
Sherlock Holmes.
Also, the AI called Mycroft Holmes from The Moon is s Harsh Mistress, if non-human characters are allowed...

[Anonymous No.22520328]

>>22518362
hey! aristophanes was a good man and by all accounts a friend of socrates

[Anonymous No.22520405]

>>22518058
He said "fiction" retard.

[Anonymous No.22520417]

>>22518242
What about Arsene Lupin who goes head to head with Sherlock?

[Anonymous No.22520428]

AM from I Have Mouth and Ice cream.

[Anonymous No.22520607]

Holden Caulfield

[Anonymous No.22520612]

>>22518362
Socrates the literary character counts on his own because he is written specifically to btfo the other interlocutors.

[Anonymous No.22520625]

Father Brown and Jeeves

[Anonymous No.22520634]

The very hungry caterpillar

[Anonymous No.22520635]

>>22518020
magister ludi

[Anonymous No.22520707]

>>22520607
He rapes his sister, Phoebe.

[Anonymous No.22521425]

>>22518242
You are the first to bring up IQ anon.

Seems like you are the obsessed one.

[Anonymous No.22521461]

>>22518242
>I'm surprised there isn't an official ONE HUNDRED MOST INTELLIGENT CHARACTERS IN LITERATURE
most of us realize that such a list would be extremely reddit

[Anonymous No.22521577]

I dont get it

[Anonymous No.22521879]

>>22521577
It's a very simple question

[Anonymous No.22522388]

>>22519807
He's mad because he can't pull back with that much ease

[Anonymous No.22523269]

>>22518020
The most celebrated "canonical" books have a hugely disproportionate number of super-smart characters, mostly because the authors are all brilliant themselves and write from experience. Comic books, anime, and popular television also have lots of "smart" characters, but these almost invariably "smarter" than Stephen Daedalus or Ivan Karamazov or whoever because their intelligence is just a superpower. It lets them predict the future, beat people up by targeting their pressure points, all that corny stuff from bad Sherlock Holmes adaptations. And that's the basic problem with your question, any answer is essentially an insult to the author. The smartest character will be the least realistic one, the most comic-bookish.