When you don't finish a book (which I'm finding I do more and more as I feel I'm running out of book time somehow, and can't waste it on not brilliant books), what happens to the characters? Do they get lost? Somewhere in you? Unresolved and wandering, in a kind of limbo? You might remember them when you're eighty, and not be sure whether you met them, dreamt them, read them, or what happened to them.
There seems to me something irresponsible about leaving characters hanging like that. But I'm not sure who the responsibility is to. Similarly it seems irresponsible to write bad characters. It's like people you've only half met, but they linger in your brain. Do writers owe us good archetypes? And do we owe it to them to finish reading and understand?
