Passage (2001 Novel) - Characters

Characters

• Joanna Lander - A clinical psychologist who attempts to learn the true nature of near-death experiences through interviews with patients. She is kind, often absent-minded, but as dogged as Sherlock Holmes when she is after a clue to her investigations. Joanna, unmarried and childless, loves Maisie, calling her "one of the world's great kids."
• Richard Wright - A neurologist who wants to discover a way to revive patients after clinical death. Described as blond and cute, he is considered aloof by Tish, who wants to date him, and a great catch by Vielle, who wants Joanna to date him. He is a nurturer: Joanna never thinks to bring lunch for herself, although an ongoing joke in the novel is that the hospital Cafeteria is never open; Richard often feeds Joanna the oranges, crackers, candy bars and sodas in his coat pockets which he brought from home.
• Vielle Howard - A nurse who works in the ER, and Joanna Lander's best friend. They regularly get together to watch movies. Vielle has a crush on a police officer who looks like Denzel Washington; but she is pursued by a morgue employee.
• Maurice Mandrake - A charlatan researcher who has interviewed patients who have had NDEs, convincing them that their experiences were exactly as he describes in his best-selling books.
• Ed Wojakowski - An elderly man who volunteers for the NDE study and claims to be a World War II veteran in the United States Navy, but is known to stretch the truth and fabricate stories. After many meandering and irrelevant stories, avoiding what he has actually experienced in an NDE, he tells Joanna after a direct question that his NDE appeared to be aboard a ship. She assumes it is the Titanic.
• Maisie Nellis - A girl about nine years old suffering from cardiomyopathy and occasional ventricular fibrillation and atrial fibrillation; often in the hospital, she is put on the list for a heart transplant. She has NDEs and is a friend of Joanna. She is obsessed with famous disasters, including the Hartford circus fire (which becomes the setting of her final NDE). Maisie infects Joanna with her obsession, so that Lander's last NDE includes people who died in that fire. "Maisie, in fact, with her junior gonzo way of facing down death, owns the spiritual center of the novel," writes Gary Wolfe.
• Pat Briarley - Joanna's English teacher in high school who spoke often of the events surrounding the Titanic, which Joanna has internalized and largely forgotten; he suffers from Alzheimer's disease.
• Kit Gardiner - Pat Briarley's niece, who has become her uncle's caregiver, and who becomes good friends with Joanna, offering to do research for her among Mr. Briarley's many books.