Characters
- Cayce Pollard – A 32-year-old woman who lives in New York City. She pronounces her given name "Case" although her parents named her after Edgar Cayce. She uses her interest in marketing trends and fads, and her psychological sensitivity to logos and advertising, in her work as an advertising consultant. Her sensitivity becomes a phobia towards older corporate mascots, especially the Michelin Man. She wears only black, gray or white, usually Fruit of the Loom shrunken cotton t-shirts (all tags removed) with Levis jeans (with the trademarks filed off the buttons) or skirts, tights, boots, as well as a Buzz Rickson MA-1 bomber jacket.
- Hubertus Bigend – The 35-year-old founder of advertising agency Blue Ant. He was born in Belgium but educated at a British boarding school and at Harvard University.
- Dorotea Benedetti – The representative of the graphic design company. She has a background in industrial espionage and is secretly hired to encourage Cayce to leave London without accepting Bigend's offer to track the film clips.
- Bernard Stonestreet – A representative of the advertising agency Blue Ant.
- "Parkaboy"/Peter Gilbert – Cayce's friend from the online discussion forum. He lives in Chicago and describes himself as a "middle-aged white guy since 1967".
- Boone Chu – A Chinese-American living in Washington State, but raised in Oklahoma. He had a failed start-up company specializing in security. He is hired to assist Cayce in the search for the maker of the footage.
- Voytek Biroshak – A blond man born in Poland and raised in Russia. He acquires and sells antique calculators to raise funds for an exhibition on Sinclair ZX81 computers.
- Damien Pease – A 30-year-old friend of Cayce whose flat she stays at while in London. He is a video director shooting a documentary on WWII battleground excavation near Stalingrad.
- Hobbs Baranov – A former NSA cryptographer and mathematician. He collects antique calculators and sells intelligence as he squats near Poole with a Gypsy group.
- Ivy – Creator of website, discussion group, and chatroom Fetish:Footage:Forum that Cayce frequents. The website's intention is to discuss the anonymous film postings.
Read more about this topic: Pattern Recognition (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“There are as many characters in men
As there are shapes in nature.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“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)
“The Nature of Familiar Letters, written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided, must plead an Excuse for the Bulk of a Collection of this Kind. Mere Facts and Characters might be comprised in a much smaller Compass: But, would they be equally interesting?”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)