I can’t speak to Pilgrim’s Progress for the simple reason that I couldn’t get past 20 pages of it before giving up, but Odysseus? That’s easy: absolutely not.
In fan fiction, a Mary Sue is an idealized character, often but not necessarily an author insert.
...Mary Sue stories—the adventures of the youngest and smartest ever person to graduate from the academy and ever get a commission at such a tender age. Usually characterized by unprecedented skill in everything from art to zoology, including karate and arm-wrestling. This character can also be found burrowing her way into the good graces/heart/mind of one of the Big Three [Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, if not all three at once. She saves the day by her wit and ability, and, if we are lucky, has the good grace to die at the end, being grieved by the entire ship.
… the “Mary Sue” is judged as a poorly developed character, too perfect and lacking in realism to be interesting.
...These traits usually reference the character’s perceived importance in the story, their physical design and an irrelevantly over-skilled or over-idealized nature.
...The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment. She’s exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She’s exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her “flaws” are obviously meant to be endearing.
...A Mary Sue character is usually written by a beginning author. Often, the Mary Sue is a self-insert with a few “improvements” (ex. better body, more popular, etc). The Mary Sue character is almost always beautiful, smart, etc… In short, she is the “perfect” girl.
In and out of the Odyssey, his defining characteristic is self-interested cleverness with a flaw of pride. He is far from perfect: he is quickly angered, selfish, and self-destructively arrogant. The whole story of the Odyssey is how his pride led to being cursed by the son of Poseidon, and all his sufferings and travails after that (not to mention all his men dying). Besides his character flaws, his personal traits are far from special: he has no supernatural abilities, he is not a demi-god or of unusual parentage like what seems like half the characters in the Illiad, he relies on personal charm or divine aid whenever he does run into supernatural entities, and his athleticism is inferior to Hector, Ajax, Heracles, etc. He is not a Mary Sue unless every trickster character like Coyote or Loki can also be considered Mary Sues as well. The Wikipedia article includes all sorts of good bits that is starkly incompatible with considering Odysseus a Mary Sue. For example, the Romans didn’t regard him as perfect:
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey portrayed Odysseus as a culture hero, but the Romans, who believed themselves the heirs of Prince Aeneas of Troy, considered him a villainous falsifier. In Virgil’s Aeneid, written between 29 and 19 BC, he is constantly referred to as “cruel Odysseus” (Latin “dirus Ulixes”) or “deceitful Odysseus” (“pellacis”, “fandi fictor”). Turnus, in Aeneid ix, reproaches the Trojan Ascanius with images of rugged, forthright Latin virtues, declaring (in John Dryden’s translation), “You shall not find the sons of Atreus here, nor need the frauds of sly Ulysses fear.” While the Greeks admired his cunning and deceit, these qualities did not recommend themselves to the Romans who possessed a rigid sense of honour. In Euripides’s tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis, having convinced Agamemnon to consent to the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the goddess Artemis, Odysseus facilitates the immolation by telling her mother, Clytemnestra, that the girl is to be wed to Achilles. His attempts to avoid his sacred oath to defend Menelaus and Helen offended Roman notions of duty; the many stratagems and tricks that he employed to get his way offended Roman notions of honour.
And maybe not Christians either:
Dante, in Canto 26 of the Inferno of his Divine Comedy, encounters Odysseus (“Ulisse” in the original Italian) near the very bottom of Hell: with Diomedes, he walks wrapped in flame in the eighth ring (Counselors of Fraud) of the Eighth Circle (Sins of Malice), as punishment for his schemes and conspiracies that won the Trojan War.
(As opposed to putting Odysseus up with the noble pagans in the first ring.) Or:
When the Achaean ships reached the beach of Troy, no one would jump ashore, since there was an oracle that the first Achaean to jump on Trojan soil would die. Odysseus tossed his shield on the shore and jumped on his shield.[citation needed] He was followed by Protesilaus, who jumped on Trojan soil and later became the first to die, after he was slain by Hector.
The story of the death of Palamedes has many versions. According to some, Odysseus never forgave Palamedes for unmasking his feigned madness, and played a part in his downfall. One tradition says Odysseus convinced a Trojan captive to write a letter pretending to be from Palamedes. A sum of gold was mentioned to have been sent as a reward for Palamedes’s treachery. Odysseus then killed the prisoner and hid the gold in Palamedes’s tent. He ensured that the letter was found and acquired by Agamemnon, and also gave hints directing the Argives to the gold. This was evidence enough for the Greeks and they had Palamedes stoned to death. Other sources say that Odysseus and Diomedes goaded Palamedes into descending a well with the prospect of treasure being at the bottom. When Palamedes reached the bottom, the two proceeded to bury him with stones, killing him.[24]
Or
When the contest of the bow begins, none of the suitors is able to string the bow, but Odysseus does, and wins the contest. Having done so, he proceeds to slaughter the suitors—beginning with Antinous whom he finds drinking from Odysseus’ cup—with help from Telemachus, Athena and two servants, Eumaeus the swineherd and Philoetius the cowherd. Odysseus tells the serving women who slept with the suitors to clean up the mess of corpses and then has those women hanged in terror. He tells Telemachus that he will replenish his stocks by raiding nearby islands.
My rhetorical questions were intended to imply that my answer to both is “no”, but I don’t think the reception of Odysseus by the Romans and Christians is to the point. What I understand by a Mary Sue is a character standing in a certain relationship to the author: a narcissistic, self-indulgent, wish-fulfillment fantasy. (The TV Tropes page includes that, but it gets rather buried amongst all the detail. The Urban Dictionary page leaves this out—it is wrong. Wikipedia is accurate. Jiro’s definition above, in his first paragraph, leaves out the narcissism, and his second paragraph over-extends the concept.)
It is a charge so easy to level against any work of fiction, including the two I mentioned, and so impossible to argue about (since it depends on the inner thoughts of the author, for which the only witness is the accused) that it contributes nothing to any serious discussion. Its purpose is summary dismissal without trial.
A few more examples in the “Mary Sue or not?” game:
Menelaus Montrose in John C. Wright’s “Count to a Trillion” series.
I haven’t read a lot of the examples you ask about. God is excluded because he is not being presented as a fictional character. A fictional character who has unlimited power, torments an innocent person and gets away with it, lectures the audience, and is presented positively probably is a Mary Sue.
Conan is borderline because the criteria for good storytelling in the sword and sorcery genre are looser than in other genres, so he can do heroic deeds and get treasure and women without this necessarily being poor storytelling, I don’t think you can seriously claim that good storytelling is sacrificed in order to have Frodo go on an adventure.
Unlike my previous examples, that list of five was not intended to suggest any particular answer to the question, “Is this a Mary Sue?”, but to indicate the problem about crying Mary Sue. One could stridently say that any of them are (Christians generally take Job to be a parable, i.e.fiction—Job no more existed than did the Prodigal Son), and where can a discussion go after that?
ETA:
As for John Galt, Google him and “Mary Sue”.
I predict that of those who have troubled to have a view on the Sueness of Galt, their view is highly correlated with their attitude to Ayn Rand’s ideas.
One could stridently say that any of them are… and where can a discussion go after that?
Well, I defined it in a way that depends on good storytelling. “Good storytelling” is subjective, yet people have conversations all the time about whether something is good storytelling.
I don’t think the fact that a sufficiently determined person could call almost anything a Mary Sue means that the concept is completely devoid of meaning, that we can’t have constructive discussions about whether a character is one, or that there can’t be more borderline and less borderline examples and most of us can agree on the less borderline ones.
There are Mary Sues, and there is didactic fiction. Is Christian a Mary Sue in The Pilgrim’s Progress?
There are Mary Sues, and there is heroic fiction. Is Odysseus a Mary Sue in the Odyssey?
I can’t speak to Pilgrim’s Progress for the simple reason that I couldn’t get past 20 pages of it before giving up, but Odysseus? That’s easy: absolutely not.
Let’s look at the definition of Mary Sue from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue , http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue , and http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Mary-Sue which collectively are a good representation of the common understanding of the term and define what it means.
In and out of the Odyssey, his defining characteristic is self-interested cleverness with a flaw of pride. He is far from perfect: he is quickly angered, selfish, and self-destructively arrogant. The whole story of the Odyssey is how his pride led to being cursed by the son of Poseidon, and all his sufferings and travails after that (not to mention all his men dying). Besides his character flaws, his personal traits are far from special: he has no supernatural abilities, he is not a demi-god or of unusual parentage like what seems like half the characters in the Illiad, he relies on personal charm or divine aid whenever he does run into supernatural entities, and his athleticism is inferior to Hector, Ajax, Heracles, etc. He is not a Mary Sue unless every trickster character like Coyote or Loki can also be considered Mary Sues as well. The Wikipedia article includes all sorts of good bits that is starkly incompatible with considering Odysseus a Mary Sue. For example, the Romans didn’t regard him as perfect:
And maybe not Christians either:
(As opposed to putting Odysseus up with the noble pagans in the first ring.) Or:
Or
My rhetorical questions were intended to imply that my answer to both is “no”, but I don’t think the reception of Odysseus by the Romans and Christians is to the point. What I understand by a Mary Sue is a character standing in a certain relationship to the author: a narcissistic, self-indulgent, wish-fulfillment fantasy. (The TV Tropes page includes that, but it gets rather buried amongst all the detail. The Urban Dictionary page leaves this out—it is wrong. Wikipedia is accurate. Jiro’s definition above, in his first paragraph, leaves out the narcissism, and his second paragraph over-extends the concept.)
It is a charge so easy to level against any work of fiction, including the two I mentioned, and so impossible to argue about (since it depends on the inner thoughts of the author, for which the only witness is the accused) that it contributes nothing to any serious discussion. Its purpose is summary dismissal without trial.
A few more examples in the “Mary Sue or not?” game:
Menelaus Montrose in John C. Wright’s “Count to a Trillion” series.
Frodo Baggins.
Conan.
John Galt.
God, in the Book of Job.
I haven’t read a lot of the examples you ask about. God is excluded because he is not being presented as a fictional character. A fictional character who has unlimited power, torments an innocent person and gets away with it, lectures the audience, and is presented positively probably is a Mary Sue.
Conan is borderline because the criteria for good storytelling in the sword and sorcery genre are looser than in other genres, so he can do heroic deeds and get treasure and women without this necessarily being poor storytelling, I don’t think you can seriously claim that good storytelling is sacrificed in order to have Frodo go on an adventure.
As for John Galt, Google him and “Mary Sue”.
Unlike my previous examples, that list of five was not intended to suggest any particular answer to the question, “Is this a Mary Sue?”, but to indicate the problem about crying Mary Sue. One could stridently say that any of them are (Christians generally take Job to be a parable, i.e.fiction—Job no more existed than did the Prodigal Son), and where can a discussion go after that?
ETA:
I predict that of those who have troubled to have a view on the Sueness of Galt, their view is highly correlated with their attitude to Ayn Rand’s ideas.
Well, I defined it in a way that depends on good storytelling. “Good storytelling” is subjective, yet people have conversations all the time about whether something is good storytelling.
I don’t think the fact that a sufficiently determined person could call almost anything a Mary Sue means that the concept is completely devoid of meaning, that we can’t have constructive discussions about whether a character is one, or that there can’t be more borderline and less borderline examples and most of us can agree on the less borderline ones.