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Katherine Lind, a foreign girl visiting in England. Twenty-two years old, Katherine is a refugee from an unnamed European country. Her home near the Rhine has been invaded by the British. Katherine is pale, with dark hair and a shield-shaped face. She has dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a wide mouth with full lips. She has returned to England, having previously spent a three-week summer holiday with the Fennels in Oxfordshire six years earlier. Lonely and isolated for the nearly two years she has been back in England, she lives above a chemist's shop and works as a temporary assistant librarian. She has not notified the Fennels of her return, but when she reads that Jane's child has died, she writes a letter of sympathy. Asked to escort Miss Green to the dentist, Katherine takes her afterward to her own apartment, where a note from Robin has been delivered. Prevented from keeping her appointment with Robin because she mistakenly picked up the wrong handbag at the chemist and feels obliged to retrieve Miss Green's purse, Katherine vows to live without the pain and disappointment that such a reunion likely would bring. Katherine recognizes that she has lost the romanticism of youth and settles instead for self-protective pessimism.

Molloy, a one-eyed and toothless writer. In his mother's room near the slaughterhouse, Molloy wants to die, but first he must write. Although he does not write for money and seems incapable of spending it, he is paid by a man who visits him every Sunday. Despite having a faulty memory for names, Molloy writes an account of his quest to see his mother. He begins his quest on bicycle by pedaling with his good leg and propping the stiff one awkwardly on the front axle. As both legs stiffen, he becomes too crippled to pedal and uses his crutches as grappling hooks to pull himself into a ditch, from which he is rescued. An only son, Molloy believes that he may have had a son himself but is uncertain of his own family history.

John Kemp, an undersized eighteen-year-old student at the University of Oxford. Kemp is physically undistinguished except for his silky hair. Kemp begins his career as an undergraduate reading English but is self-conscious and shy. Pressuredintotestingearlyforascholarship, he is frightened and insecure about leaving his working-class home of Huddlesford in northern England. His isolation is intensified when he meets his roommate, Christopher Warner, a crass and worldly public school graduate. Afraid of having no companions, Kemp attempts to imitate students from a higher social class, but his repeated social failures prompt Kemp to become a fantasizer. He creates Jill, an imaginary sister, and embellishes a fantasy life for her until he meets a young woman who appears to be the actual Jill. His pursuit of the real girl ends in disaster when he drunkenly attempts to kiss her and is dunked in a school fountain. Kemp ends the semester in the college infirmary, sick with pneumonia and accepting the death of his love for Jill.

English poet and author. Poetry

English poet and critic. The English poet, critic, editor, and translator Donald Alfred Davie was born the son of George Clarke Davie, a sergeant in a Scottish regiment, and Alice (Sugden) Davie, a schoolmistress who cultivated Davie’s predisposition for literary criticism by encouraging him to record the substance of every book he read. Donald Davie attended Cambridge University and joined the Royal Navy upon graduation. Assigned to Arctic Russia in World War II, he combated loneliness by reading the works of Robert Burns, Lord Byron, and Russian authors in translation. He later documented this period in These the Companions. In January, 1945, before going to India for the last months of the war, he married Doreen John.

Christopher Hadley “Pincher” Martin, a British navy lieutenant, called “Pincher” because that is the standard nickname for Martins in the Royal Navy. Prior to the war, he was an actor, with an eagle profile and wavy hair. Because he had no belief in anything but his own importance, he betrayed those close to him by sleeping with his producer's wife to advance his career and by raping his best friend's wife after serving as best man at their wedding. He is blown from his ship by a German torpedo. In the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles from land and thirty miles from a British convoy, Martin desperately attempts to stay alive on a barren rock in the North Atlantic. Clinging to the rock, he feeds on mussels and lichens as he rationally plots his survival and rescue. In an attempt to retain touches of humanity, he names the various sections of rock, many after London locations, though he imagines the rocks to be teeth in some mighty, threatening jaw ready to devour him, and he shaves himself with his knife. Fearing to sleep, he remains exposed on the rock for four days, buffeted by the elements. When he suffers food poisoning, Martin, using parts of his life belt, performs a crude, improvisational enema on himself. Because he is still wearing his heavy boots when his corpse washes ashore at novel's end, the navy determines that he must have been drowned at sea at the time of the explosion. Essentially, the novel's main character has been a corpse, and its main action has been merely the expansion of Martin's instantaneous imaginings as he struggled all too briefly to stay alive.