Characters in Galatea 2.2
- Richard Powers: The central character of the novel, Powers shares certain traits and experiences with the novelist without being a complete copy of the author.
- Lentz: Lentz is a sarcastic and brilliant researcher and scientist. He creates Helen in an effort to explore the workings of the human brain, to somehow discover how a mere biological accident could so destroy the woman he loved.
- Helen: Helen is the creation of Lentz and Richard; Lentz builds her, and Richard educates her. She is a net, spread out over innumerable computers, and she is taught using the literary canon. Only when she is exposed to reality—the murder, rage, etc. that characterize daily news and the human world—does she realize fully that she does not belong nor does she wish to belong in this world. One of the central arguments of the book comes from Helen and whether she has human emotions, or is simply simulating human emotion.
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Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“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)