Characters
- Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan, a young artist and confidant of Grandpa Winnegan. In the poem Hiawatha, "the gentle Chibiabos" is Hiawatha's close friend.
- Grandpa Winnegan, whose original name was Finnegan. He claimed to be a descendant of the "Tim Finnegan" whose death and resurrection are celebrated in the song Finnegan's Wake. He is the last bastion of individual enterprise in the mechanized nanny-state. His adopted last name is a pun on "Win again".
- Mama Winnegan, Chib's mother who spends her life drinking, eating, and playing poker with disreputable friends. She may know that Grandpa is hiding in their apartments, but pretends not to.
- Falco Accipter, a "gummint" agent who is determined to track down Grandpa's stolen money, and perhaps Grandpa himself.
- Rex Luscus, one-eyed art critic whose eye is mostly on Chib's body. He could have his other eye replaced, but he claims that no art he sees makes it worth his while to have binocular vision.
- The "Young Radishes", Chib's circle of friends who play at plotting revolution and defying authority through their art. Their name is a pun on "radical", meaning either a root (as in root vegetable or radish) or a person who advocates drastic change in society.
- Omar Bacchylides Runic, a poet with a talent for extemporizing, and Chib's occasional lover. His improvised poems tend to inflame people to riot.
- Benedictine Serinus Melba, a singer who claims to be pregnant by Chib. Thanks to an incident with a can of spermicide, Chib finds this hard to believe.
- Rousseau Red Hawk, who affects the persona of a "Red Indian" even though he is a Jewish philosopher who feels intellectually deprived in the nature reserves.
- Huga Wells-Erb Heinsturbury, a science fiction writer whose unwieldy adopted name is derived from the names Hugo Gernsback, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs (E.R.B), Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury.
- Pinkerton Legrand, a gummint agent monitoring the Young Radishes.
Read more about this topic: Riders Of The Purple Wage
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)