Sympathy in "Still Life" and "Lethal"

I was struck by how monologue functioned differently in these two excerpts.   Both of the narrators are from the edges of humanity.  One is a soldier who took advantage of his time in the army to enact violence upon families and children and the other one is a rapist, or at least, he wants to be.

    "Lethal" left me with no sympathy.  I almost felt tricked because of the gentle way that the narrative began.   "I just want to touch you a little" and "I just want to caress you a little",  it sounds almost sweet, a character just wanting to be close. to another person  As the monologue gains momentum however, that changes.   The requests become more invasive and the speaker becomes angrier and angrier by his object's refusal to remain an object, by the 'NO'.   At the end, this became a character that I reviled because of his insistent feeling of entitlement to another person's body in relation to building his own identity.

 "Still Life" while dealing with violence and with a lack of humanity, was resonant in a different way. I think partly it was his use of the past tense, situating his actions as things that happened not today, that made me more sympathetic.  But it also was his self-awareness.  The character uses the monologue to confess without seeking any kind of forgiveness and because he is self-aware, I felt sympathy for this character who admitted to killing people.  Not in an absolving kind of way, but there was definitely a twinge of something sympathetic.

It made me wonder about the ways that sympathy can function in a narrative and what characters are we, as readers, naturally disposed to be sympathetic towards. When characters are not self-aware, when they exist in a vacuum in which they are owed something, it puts this reader at least on the defensive.  The difficulty in navigating a character who lacks a self-consciousness is that this is a consciousness in which the reader does have insight.  This is frustrating.  However, when a character is self-aware, when they are acknowledging their actions and their culpability, I trust the character to have an awareness of themselves that then prompts sympathy.