Characters
- Angel Archer: narrator, manager of a Berkeley record store, widow of Jeff Archer
- Timothy Archer: Bishop of California, father of the late Jeff Archer and father-in-law of Angel. Dies in Israel, searching for psychotropic mushroom connected with Zadokite sect. Based on James Albert Pike, Dick's personal friend, who was an American Episcopalian bishop
- Kirsten Lundborg: Timothy Archer's secretary and lover. Dies from barbiturate overdose after loss of remission from cancer.
- Bill Lundborg: Kirsten's son who has schizophrenia, and who is obsessed with cars.
- Edgar Barefoot: Houseboat guru, radio personality, lecturer, based on Alan Watts
- Jeff Archer: professional student, Angel's deceased husband, romantically obsessed with Kirsten, son of Timothy Archer
Read more about this topic: The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that’s basically a conservative view of life.”
—Jane Smiley (b. 1949)
“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)
“Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)