Characters
- Alfred Jones: The narrator, a widower in his 50s with a glove over his artificial left hand. He marries Anna-Luise Fischer.
- Anna-Luise Fischer: The daughter of the title’s Dr. Fischer and wife of narrator Alfred Jones. She despises her father for the way he treats people, especially how he treated her late mother.
- Dr. Fischer: A fabulously wealthy man who made his fortune via the invention of perfumed toothpaste. Fischer is a widower who throws dinner parties to humiliate his rich guests.
- Mrs. Montgomery: A wealthy widow who can never remember Jones’ name and keeps calling him “Smith.” She is the only female guest at the dinner parties.
- Deane: A former pin-up actor whose looks are fading. He is a guest at the dinner parties.
- The Divisionnaire: A retired Swiss military officer, sometimes mistakenly called “The General” by his fellow dinner party guests.
- Belmont: A tax accountant and guest at the dinner parties.
- Kips: A secretive man with a severely deformed spine that causes him to stoop so far that he faces the ground. He appears to be involved in arms smuggling.
- Steiner: The former love interest of Mrs. Fischer, now a clerk in a Geneva record store. Steiner was fired by Mr. Kips after Dr. Fischer found out about his friendship with Mrs. Fischer.
Read more about this topic: Doctor Fischer Of Geneva
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life which does not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“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.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)