Unlikable Characters

After reading half of the book one thing I can say for sure is that I don't like any of the characters.  They only care about love and relationships.  Even more annoying is the fact that the relationships that they care about often date all the way back to their college years.  Many of these are relationships that have long since ended.

For example, Billy still holds a grudge against Dorothy for not running away to Canada with him way back in 1969.  He is always asking her "'How's Ron?'"(118).  Ron is Dorothy's husband and the person that she was seeing when she decided not to run away with Billy, her boyfriend at the time.  Billy even continues to love Dorothy through a marriage with another woman.  It is understandable that he would be jealous and unhappy, but it is unreasonable for him to hold a grudge for thirty years.

Another character with relationship problems is Spook.  She is married to two men but feels the need to fall in love with a third.  Her two husbands don't mind her loving the two of them, but they are not willing to let another man into the relationship and the new man does not want to be included either.  After this new man leaves, Spook falls into despair. "Her unhappiness, Spook realized, had little to do with [the man] and very much to do with her own self esteem"(95).  Spook is in love with falling in love.  She always needs someone new and different.  She is very selfish and takes both of her devoted husbands for granted.

I could go on and on about all of the characters and their relationship problems, but I think you get the point.  The issues that all the characters have lead back to their relationships.  In the present time of the book, the characters are in their fifties and they still act like twenty-year-olds.  This is one of the main common faults among the characters that makes me hate them.  Luckily I am supposed to hate the characters.  All of them are so unlikable for their whims and follies that I can't help but get frustrated with them.  It reminds me of Brave New World, and how Bernard, and John seemed likable but proved to have more faults than redeeming qualities.  I didn't like the decisions they made or the way that they acted.  Unlikable characters seem to show up often in the books we have read.  Milkman, Guitar, Lenina, and Offred are other examples that come to mind.  I know that I am supposed to dislike the characters in July, July, but why did O'Brien write them that way?

It seems to be a critique on the time period.  He is trying to prove that the Vietnam War affected everyone's lives.  He says in the book that, "...in some nationwide darkroom, the most ordinary human snapshots would be fixed in memory by the acidic wash of war—the music, the lingo, the evening news"(75).  This passage explains exactly the point that O'Brien is attempting to convey: the Vietnam war affected everything.  This could explain why his characters seem to be trapped in their past.  They were in their twenties during the war, so in a way those years were taken away from them and they are now going to live as if they were still twenty for the rest of their lives.