You need an opening line that establishes a protagonist by endurance rather than virtue; or a character arc that begins in negative space, where having nothing is what makes him indestructible.

The novel opens with a man already dead in every way that matters except one, and that one refusal is the whole engine of the book. Foyle survives 170 days of the slow, stupid, ambitionless man's death precisely because he has nothing in him worth killing. It's the setup for Bester's real claim: what you survive before you're awake decides what you'll do once you're kicked awake.