Drawing a (Good) Villain

Here are three essentials to fleshing out the skeleton of your villain:

• A villain must not only oppose the external and internal desires of the hero but also have an active internal longing and pressure to achieve that goal.

• A villain must have a character flaw or flaws that outweighs character strengths, measured in accordance with the story’s literary argument.

• A villain’s physical traits and carriage should reinforce the emotional response you want from your reader as well as your moral premise. (Not all villains will have a crooked appearance. Consider who is villain and who is hero in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.)

An author may compose a villain with these elements in a multitude of ways. Today, let’s study the ultimate villain of Anthony Doerr’s 2015 Pulitzer winner, All the Light We Cannot See, a dual-protagonist story. I like this example because though this Nazi officer gives us a rich insight into the interior life of the overall story’s conglomerate antagonist, the Third Reich, he never utters a harsh word or holds a gun to anyone’s head. In a book set in a time of war and resistance, many horrific and heroic deeds occur. But Doerr builds the ultimate face of evil through a close look at inner drive, insurmountable flaws, and the physical manifestation of the inner soul.

First, a quick synopsis to set the scene:

Twelve years old and blind, Marie-Laure, the daughter of a humble locksmith for Paris’s Natural Museum of History, makes for an unlikely hero in Nazi-occupied France. But she has a secret. Her father has given her a massive diamond from the museum’s collection to hide from the Germans. The jewel is fabled to be cursed, so that if you possess it, you cannot die—but others around you will. Marie-Laure and her father flee Paris to her reclusive uncle’s house in Saint-Malo, where—as we know from the beginning but the characters do not—there will be a massive siege and bombing before the war ends. As Marie-Laure passes the time there aiding the resistance, she begins to lose those she loves. But still, she protects the diamond.

Enter Doerr’s villain, a German officer and jewel expert tasked with appraising national treasures for the Nazi coffers:

Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel is forty-one years old, not so old that he cannot be promoted. He has moist red lips; pale, almost translucent cheeks like fillets of raw sole; and an instinct for correctness that rarely fails him. He has a wife who suffers his absences without complaint, and who arranges porcelain kittens by color, lightest to darkest, on two different shelves in their drawing room in Stuttgart. He also has two daughters whom he has not seen in nine months. The eldest, Veronica, is deeply earnest. Her letters to him include phrases like sacred resolve, proud accomplishments, and unparalleled in history.

Can you feel his sense of duty and order, and also his ignorance of authentic love? Perhaps it’s the face like raw fish or a wife who seems not to miss her husband gone nine months, but who rather fills her time dividing up her porcelain figures the way the Führer is dividing Germany by race.

In this story, we cannot vilify von Rumpel solely on the basis of his allegiance to the German side. The other heroic protagonist, the orphan Werner Pfennig, is also caught up in the German war machine, participating in its atrocities. Werner’s expertise is also commandeered by the Nazi’s for their ill purposes. Werner also suffers some moral blindness due to pursuit of duty and self-interest. Werner shoots his gun. But in this short chapter of von Rumpel’s introduction, Doerr distinguishes his villain by drawing our attention to one overriding metaphor—the budding cancer growing inside his body.

Doerr doesn’t come right out and say von Rumpel has cancer. He lets us discover it along with its intrinsic connection to the villain’s goal. Doerr sets Von Rumpel to exploring gem books in a Vienna library in search of information on the jewels on the Führer’s wishlist. “He tries to cross his legs but a slight swelling troubles his groin today: odd, though not painful.” He discovers the story of the fabled diamond Marie-Laure guards. While he plans to search all Europe for it, aiming to find this “one pebble tucked inside its folds,” we see that the “pebble” inside his folds, a testicular tumor, seeks to take possession of him. One represents his external goal, the other his internal drive. Both will eat the man alive.

Doerr tells the story out of chronological order; instead of a focus on the growth of time, he focuses on each character’s inner growth—the events and revelations that catalyze their choices, all the ways against the odds they try to be good to one another. Except von Rumple. Doerr synchronizes the slow destruction of von Rumpel’s body with the cancerous, self-destructing German army and the growing disintegration of any chance von Rumpel will wake up and choose to do good for any other human being.

The tension rises. Von Rumpel closes in on his prey. While other characters wrestle with the evil of their time and fight against it, even if only in some small way, to retain something of their humanity, von Rumpel closes his eyes to what he sees and fights only for what will serve his self-interest. Doerr maintains the integral connection of physical composition and moral choice:

Sergeant Major von Rumpel is summoned to a warehouse outside Lodz. It is the first time he has traveled since completing his treatments in Stuttgart, and he feels as though the density of his bones has decreased. . . .
. . . Already his spine feels as if it might splinter. . . .
. . . Von Rumple counts the other bags [of precious jewels] beneath the table: nine. “Where,” he begins to ask, “did they all—”
But he knows where they came from.

Here was the moment of von Rumple’s wavering—a full realization and admission of what his mission is costing everyone else. But he tramples his conscience down. He stamps out the light, and from here on, we see only resolve to save his own life through the story of the diamond. As long as he finds and possesses it, he will live—even if everyone else dies.

When inevitably, von Rumpel drags himself to the place where the sought-after stone hides, his desperation—both physical and metaphysical—is palpable. He knows the stone is within his grasp, and we see that even above duty, above loyalty to his country and countrymen, is his love of self. All the following of orders that has come before has been a mere excuse, an opportunism, and an abuse of power. He will find the stone and

clamp it to his heart and wait for the goddess to thrust her fiery hand through its planes and burn away his afflictions. Burn his way out of this citadel, out of this siege, out of this disease. He will be saved.

Von Rumpel shoots no gun, fires no missile, and takes no part in destroying the city. Yet we are at once full of pity and revulsion for this man as the face we are given for all that is evil. We have known the end result of the siege since the novel’s beginning—many will die. In an instant, by “luck, good or bad,” “chance or physics,” some will survive, some will be snuffed out, the determination of which lives are taken wholly independent from the judgment of which lives deserve to be spared.

But in the interim of the first look at this ending and the accomplishment of it, individuals find ways in the darkness to shine some light. Yet as protagonist Marie-Laure prays in her moment of great danger the words she has learned from the housekeeper that cared for her, “Lord Our God Your Grace is a purifying fire,” von Rumple can think only of himself. He will not be saved, no matter if he lives or dies.

Doerr knows how to “spend his literary dimes” in his tight prose, and he knows how to direct our attention to the essence and tension of a character—both the light and the dark in each of them that we must sense and cannot see—through spare, well-chosen images and words. He gives his villain a palpable inner drive—preservation of self—that the reader can identify with, a flaw that overcomes any strengths, and a physical presentation that reinforces his moral premise with emotionally-charged power. Von Rumple is a great villain we hate to love—but we do, because he is us.