20 Unsympathetic Characters You Sort Of Understand

Daniel Plainview is cruel, competitive, emotionally starved, and consumed by the need to defeat everyone around him. But he also seems like a man built in loneliness and hardened by labor, injury, risk, and suspicion. He trusts almost no one because trust looks, to him, like the first step toward being beaten. The oil business rewards every awful instinct he has. Daniel does not become inhuman despite capitalism. He becomes successful because of the parts of him it feeds.