Characters
- Mr McIlvaine: first-person narrator
- Martin Pemberton: Freelance journalist, who writes scathing reviews and is at odds with his father
- Augustus Pemberton: gained wealth from the slave trade and the production of low grade war goods during the American Civil War
- Harry Wheelwright: the only friend of Martin Pemberton. McIlvaine doesn't like him
- Emily Tisdale: fiancée and schoolfriend of Martin
- Revd. Charles Grimshaw: in the circle of Augustus Pemberton
- Edmund Donne: One of the few policemen in New York who is not corrupt.
- Dr. Sartorius: Doctor with a Faust-like thirst for knowledge . He worked in military hospitals during the Civil War. In this role he appears in E.L. Doctorow's later novel, The March. McIlvaine gives the origin of his name, the Latin word for dressmaker.
Read more about this topic: The Waterworks
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
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“Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
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“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.”
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