Top 10 grudge holders in fiction

A grudge is usually characterised as an unreasonable holding on to some wrong, long after the customs of courtesy would allow it. In the popular imagination, the grudge holder is a comical figure, mostrar más absurd if not maligned, eventually relegated to the periphery of society because of their unwillingness to forgive and forget.


But as I started to think about the grudge holders in these books, it became clear that these characters are serious and, accordingly, their grudges ought to be treated seriously. Because what is a grudge but a refusal to go along with social niceties for the comfort of others, to maintain the peace of the status quo? The grudge has a politics of its own.


The difference between, say, righteous anger and a grudge is duration: righteous anger resolves itself in forgiveness or revenge but the grudge lingers. The grudge holder keeps and foregrounds their discomfort, other people’s dismissal of which marks a kind of social violence. They insist on making the wrongs against them visible, in sitting with the difficulty; and in many cases, the wrongs committed against these characters are those arising from unequal and disabling social systems.

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The grudge holder’s ongoing refusal to forgive, the insistence on the unforgivable nature of the wrong committed, amount in these books to a refusal to accept the condition of the world as it is – a refusal that is the basic precondition for a new and changed world.

Sarah Bernstein – LT author page mostrar menos