Characters
- Doc Burton – A doctor who, despite his skepticism of leftist views, works in the strikers' camp, ensuring that it cannot be disbanded on the basis of a lack of sanitation.
- Jim Nolan– New member of the "Party," whose political development is one of the book's central themes. His father was a Communist himself, and was legendary as one who fought.
- London – the second, but more significant, elected leader of the striking workers
- Mrs. Meer – Jim's landlady
- Harry Nilson – Party official who initiates Jim's application process for the Party
- Roy Nolan – Jim's father (killed three years earlier)
- Mr. Webb – Manager at Tulman's Department Store, where Jim worked who denies knowing Jim when he hears he is a radical.
- May Nolan – Jim's older sister who mysteriously disappears at a young age
- Mac McLeod – Party organizer and Jim's mentor
- Dick Halsing – "pretty boy" party member in charge of soliciting Party sympathizers for donations
- Joy – naive, possibly brain-damaged from police brutality, aggressive party member; World War I veteran
- Alfred Anderson – Owner/operator of Al's Lunch Wagon; Communist sympathizer and son of a small farmer.
- Sam – "lean-face", a picker
- Lisa – London's daughter-in-law who is assisted by Mac when in labor
- Dan – an old picker whose fall from a rotten ladder initially causes the other workers to take strike action
- Dakin – leader of pickers at the Hunter place
- Alla – Dakin's wife
- Jerry – a picker at Hunter's who favors strike
- Al Anderson – Alfred's father, small farm owner, proud of his dogs
- Burke – Dakin's assistant
- Albert Johnson – truck owner
- Bolter – President of the Fruitgrower's Association who attempts to negotiate with the strikers
Read more about this topic: In Dubious Battle
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.”
—Jonathan Miller (b. 1936)
“There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)