Personality
Lister is very lazy, and more importantly, unmotivated. He is a slob, his best shirt is a one with only two curry stains on the front, and prior to going into stasis he saved money by never buying soap, deodorant or socks. He enjoys "bumming around", drinking large amounts of lager, and eating Indian food and listening to a genre of music called Rasta Billy Skank. He is a supporter of the London Jets zero-gravity football team. Lister has dreadlocks on the back of his head, which he seems to have for most of his life (in "Future Echoes", Lister meets himself at age 171, and his dreadlocks are the length of his body; they are also present, if shorter, on his 17-year-old self in "Timeslides"). Lister's religious beliefs are unclear. In the episode, "The Last Day", Kryten states that Lister is a pantheist, believing God to be in all things; however, in the later episode "Back to Reality" he is described as the "ultimate atheist". In "Waiting For God", Lister displays disgust over the Cat people's war over a religious disagreement stating that they were "using religion as an excuse to be really crappy to each other."
He prides himself on being a good man possessing moral courage, something which is used against him by a 'despair squid' in "Back to Reality"; when hallucinating under the influence of the squid's ink, he was driven to suicidal despair by his belief that, in the alternate world in which he found himself, he was a genocidal minister in a totalitarian state, responsible for the murder of countless innocent people. When confronted with an evil version of himself on a corrupted version of Red Dwarf, Lister says of his evil counterpart, "But he kills; I'm not capable of that." Likewise when he kills "The Creator" of Red Dwarf during his Back to Earth hallucination, his initial reaction is to state that he doesn't kill people and doesn't understand why he did it. His value for life was also shown when he and Kryten were being hunted by the Inquisitor, Lister being deeply affected by the knowledge that Kryten's seemingly imminent death would only mean something because he had helped Kryten to break his programming, thus giving him a life to lose. He has also shown some philosophical traits over the course of the series, such as when he reflected on the unfair nature of life and relative futility of the penal colony in "Justice", saying that the Justice Field didn't grant its inmates any kind of free will. He also lamented on the escalation of uncontrolled evolution that resulted in the creation of the Despair Squid in "Back to Reality".
In many ways, Lister is the complete opposite of Rimmer, and the two are constantly at odds with each other. Rimmer is constantly accusing Lister of stupidity but Lister has actually been shown to be quite intelligent on several occasions and his lack of motivation is really what holds him back. For example, he managed to learn the international language Esperanto from Rimmer's tapes, while Rimmer himself was unable to. He is capable of piloting a spaceship and has a knack for mechanical repairs, particularly amateur cybernetics. When the Inquisitor appeared on Red Dwarf to judge the crew, he declared that Lister's failure to put his brain to good use was evidence that he had not lived a worthwhile life. Lister is a very socially capable person; well liked by his friends and has had a number relationships with women, albeit not all successful (his lack of ambition being the main cause for not settling down). He has a high emotional intelligence being capable of reading people and empathizing with them. The novel Last Human explains that Lister often knows the solution to a problem but that he usually consults Kryten as he lacks confidence in his own opinion. He also considers himself good at pool, saying that he was nicknamed "Dave Cinzano Bianco Lister" because once he was on a table you couldn't get rid of him.
Dave Lister is also an avid junk collector who has purchased (among other things) a talking toilet, a talking toaster with artificial intelligence, and two robot goldfish, which he named Lennon and McCartney (the latter of which swims backwards and is prone to breaking down).
Read more about this topic: Dave Lister (Red Dwarf)
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