The Wet Codfish Award for Annoying Fictional Characters
In response to this post by frumiousb about Proust's The Captive and The Fugitive, I commented as follows:
Narrator becomes strong contender for 'literary character we would most like to see repeatedly slapped about the chops with a wet codfish' (duking it out with Esther Summerson from Bleak House, the queen of nauseous self-deprecating tweeness).
So: wet codfishes at the ready, who are your candidates?* (And maybe I could then put together a poll, and we could vote.)
*They have to be characters whom the author is setting up as somehow sympathetic, or even admirable, but have a very different effect on the reader.