Ask HN: Fiction about Introverts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Fiction about Introverts?

18 pointswebmaven9 comments

I recently read the (rather excellent) Murderbot Diaries series and realized that it isn't just social interactions that tend to assume that people are extroverts, but that most fiction does too.

I recall reading as a kid any number of mystery stories where the protagonist was shut-in for some reason (agoraphobia, for example), and misanthropes abound in anything with a hint of noir, but introverts per-se seem to be rare (which strikes me as odd, since authors are often introverts).

So, any recommendations? I'm personally interested in science fiction and fantasy, but mysteries or (techno)thrillers will do as well. Not really into horror, but don't let that stop you, I'm sure others here will be interested.

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The main character of Machines Like Me [https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9781787331679/Machines-McEwan-Ian...] is, somewhat. (Also a decent sci-fi story)

Haruki Murakami's narrators all seem like introverts to me. Try Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki or 1Q84.

Many of Iain M. Banks' characters are. Try The Algebraist or The Player of Games.

In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the main character keeps mostly to herself, but I'm not sure if that's due to her introversion or the broken world she lives in.

I enjoyed an anime called 'Im a spider, so what?' where the main character gets transferred to another dimension, except as a spider.

She's a genki girl in the anime (hyperactive trope) but only when she is alone. When she talks to others, she's an introvert (very terse and soft spoken), which is an interesting version of the trope. The only name she goes by is Kumoko (rough translation: Miss Spider, or maybe Spider-cutie).

In the original source material (the original Novels), she's fully an introvert. But I think the problem with anime is that acting in front of an audience is innately an extrovert activity.

Introverts can be side characters in an anime (Rei from Evangeleon, Nagato from Haruhi), but since they sit around and think to themselves so much it's hard for them to be a main character. Kumoko is an interesting way of doing it, since she is only hyperactive when she is alone.

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Mild spoilers: but the people who got transferred over got forms that best represented their soul. Most became a human again, but a few swapped genders and another few became monsters.

In the case of Kumoko, her introverted nature matched the spider the most. In contrast, teacher has the 'young at heart' trope and thus the teacher got the form of an elf, for example.

As an Isekai novel / anime, it's fantasy + sci-fi. They are all clearly in some kind of techo-video game world, but magic seems to have been the cause for how they all got trapped in the first place.

Hmm, I think I should provide a spoiler from the middle of the show for how this works out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL-ZnETGFOA. (I'd choose something earlier, but there's just so much setup early on, and I think this scene here is more representative of what you get throughout the show)

As you can see, Kumoko often goes into long monologues with herself throughout the anime. But the show makes it clear that she almost never talks to others. Basically, she's the kind of person whose "inside brain" is racing at a million-miles per hour, but what she shows on the outside is a soft spoken introvert who really dislikes interacting with humans, or others in general.

When in "Kumoko perspective", we can see how Kumoko thinks of herself as a cute little spider. But as we switch perspectives to other people in the world, she's a true spider monster, whose human-level intelligence is a severe problem (especially as she's an adept of Magic: Poison magics, Fire Magics, Earth Magic and more).

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse (who also wrote Siddhartha) deals directly with a scholar who struggles with human interaction until he falls for a mysterious woman in a jazz bar. The first half of the book details internal suffering and can be a bit heavy, but the second half is filled with good dialogue about protagonist pushing through his understanding of himself.

I’m Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid.

Without wanting to spoiler you — it’s about a few introverts, and it’s narrated in a way that focuses heavily on the inner world, on their thoughts, the culture they enjoy, their deliberations, what they say and what they hold back.

It is a horror too, sort of.

My books often feature introverts.

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Also, Kafka’s protagonists could reasonably be be considered introverts. Their dialogue externalizes the feeling of being introverted, in that they acknowledge futility, and they produce intricately detailed considerations that others are unable to relate to entirely, but it is presented as though there is no reservation in stating their inner concerns outright. Kafka, in this way, presents an excellent study of introversion if introverts had few, if any, inhibitions. This often results in the grotesque.

The first thing that comes to my mind is Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education. It's something like Harry Potter mixed with Lord of the Flies; imagine if Hogwarts had no teachers, and the building was self-aware, and it sometimes tried to kill students.

The protagonist is definitely an introvert, and her narration is basically what made the story work for me. It's YA, but without too many tropes.

One or two of the main characters in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon probably fit the bill.

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, the narrator feigns being deaf and dumb.

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