Okay, so this is actually a trickier question than it seems. The novel 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' is entirely told through the letters of Eva Khatchadourian. So in terms of the narrator and the perspective we’re trapped inside, Eva is absolutely the protagonist. We experience every agonizing moment through her eyes—her doubts about motherhood, her fraying marriage, her gut-wrenching horror after the school incident. But the book is about Kevin, her son. He’s the gravitational center that warps everything. You could argue he’s the main character because the entire plot is Eva trying to understand him, to piece together whether he was born that way or if she made him that way. Lionel Shriver never gives us Kevin’s direct thoughts, which is the whole point. He’s this terrifying, enigmatic void we only see reflected in Eva’s shattered mirror.
The film adaptation with Tilda Swinton, which is also brilliant, makes Eva even more visually central. But the book’s genius is in its structural ambiguity. It forces you to ask who the story truly belongs to: the one telling it or the one it’s being told about. I lean towards Eva because her psychological journey is the one we’re on, even if the destination is always Kevin.