simon williamson

A slick, amoral con artist, and Renton's oldest friend. He is always on the lookout for the "perfect scam", despite being perfectly inept at serious crime. He picks up women with ease and flaunts this quality in front of his friends. By the end of the novel, he has become a pimp of young girls. Essentially, a combination of Byronic hero and villain, he enjoys flaunting his ability to use heroin semi-casually, then stopping at will, without developing an addiction. Sick Boy considers himself above everyone he interacts with in terms of class, restraint, and moral fibre, despite being one of the most shallow and callous characters in the novel. When thinking to himself, he often imagines he is speaking with Sean Connery. While Begbie represents unavoidable, unanswerable violence to the antihero of the novel, Sick Boy represents cold, calculated expediency, the type of life that Renton would have if he had no conscience or moral restraints.…more