The Blind Assassin

Laura is the younger Chase sister, who died at age twenty-five after fatally (and likely intentionally) driving Iris's car off a bridge. She became posthumously famous as the author of The Blind Assassin, which appeared to present a thinly-veiled account of her affair with Alex Thomas. In fact, it was Iris who both had the affair and wrote the book, but Laura also harbored feelings for Alex. Whether those feelings were romantic is never entirely clear, but they were certainly intense; Richard's threats of turning Alex over to the police are enough to blackmail Laura into sleeping with him, and Laura's discovery of Alex's affair with Iris precipitates her suicide. The unnamed female character in Iris's novel is therefore in some ways a stand-in for Laura as well—or, at least, a stand-in for what Laura's relationship to Alex might have been "in another dimension of space" (500).

At the very least, the anonymous woman's vulnerability and sensitivity link her to Laura, who (according to Iris)was always a thin-skinned and somewhat eccentric person: 

[s]he had unaccountable crises—a dead crow would start her weeping, a cat smashed by a car, a dark cloud in a clear sky. On the other hand, she had an uncanny resistance to physical pain: if she burnt her mouth or cut herself, as a rule she didn't cry. It was ill will, the ill will of the universe, that distressed her (85).

 Perhaps most importantly, Laura has a tendency to take things literally and, relatedly,to see everything in absolutes: she pursues interests and goals single-mindedly, and views moral questions in black and white, and according to her own ethical code. This idealism makes Laura a misfit in the high-society world she inhabits, because she tends to ignore class distinctions and (more broadly) social conventions in general: "[b]ut even as a child, Laura never quite agreed. Was this the problem? That she held firm for no when yeswas the thing required?" (440).

As this passage implies, Laura's idiosyncrasies and absolutism are what allow Richard and Winifred to plausibly claim that she has gone insane, when they have in fact smuggled her off to have an abortion. Arguably, this idealism is also what leads to Laura's death, since she sacrifices her own body to Richard in a bid to ensure Alex's safety, only to learn that Alex was having an affair with Iris.

Alex Thomas is a young man who meets the Chase sisters at a Labor Day picnic. According to Alex, he was found orphaned as a young child somewhere in Eastern Europe, his parents having presumably died in World War I. The Red Cross brought him to Canada, where he was eventually adopted by a Presbyterian minister. He himself, however, dropped out of divinity school and supports himself by writing pulp science-fiction novels. Although he strikes up a friendship with Laura, his socialist sympathies make him a suspect in the aftermath of the fire at the button factory. With the sisters' help, he manages to escape Port Ticonderoga, resurfacing shortly after Iris's marriage to Richard. The two begin a love affair that results in a child, Aimee, but Alex himself dies in combat during World War II and never meets his daughter.

Iris's relationship with Alex serves as the inspiration for her novel The Blind Assassin, and most of what we know about Alex's personality comes from this source. In the story, Alex (referred to simply as "he") iscynical and at times cruel, often needling his lover about her upper-class background and commenting crudely on her body. Nevertheless, Iris does depict Alex as caring for and even loving her, and suggests that his failure to tell her so is born of insecurity: "[a]lthough he knows she wants him to, he won't say he loves her. Perhaps it would leave him armourless, like an admission of guilt" (111). What's more, it is ultimately Iris who stands in the way of their relationship, refusing to leave her husband when Alex asks her to. This hints that Iris may actually be the more pragmatic of the two and Alex the more idealistic, despite Iris's repeated attempts to steer the story Alex is telling her in a happier and more romantic direction.

Richard Griffen is the president of Royal Classic Knitwear, a clothing company in competition with Chase Industries. The Griffen family is less established than the Chase family, leading Reenie to derisively label Richard "new money" (175). However, by the time Iris meets Richard in her late teens, his business is faring considerably better than her father's. After the Chase button factory burns down, Richard leverages his business dealings with Chase Industries first to marry Iris and then to buy out the company. Ultimately, he hopes to use these social connections, along with his financial success, to launch a political career.

Richard is in his mid-thirtiesby the time Iris first meets him, and she initially considers him rather unremarkable. There are signs, however, that his bland exterior hides a ruthless streak. Unlike Norval Chase, for instance, Richard has no sympathy for the poor or unemployed, and is an outspoken critic of anything that resembles socialism (he is also, we learn, a Nazi sympathizer). As Iris's husband, Richard is outwardly kind, but also patronizing and abusive, as evidenced by the bruises he leaves on her body after sex. These red flags pave the way for the ultimate revelation that Richard "has a yen for young girls" and raped the then-teenage Laura several times over the course of his marriage to Iris (506). Iris hints that Richard's cruelty actually stems from his knowledge of his own inadequacy ("[i]t wasn't that he was too big for his boots: he wasn't big enough for them"), but admits that he remains "blurred" and unknowable to her in some ways (480, 479). In the end, Richard commits suicide following the publication of The Blind Assassin, perhaps because he was humiliated by the implication that Laura was sleeping with someone else all the time he was having his "squalid little fling with her" (519).

Winifred is Richard's possessive younger sister. She is twenty-nine or thirty and married at the time Iris meets her, but her husband is always "travelling," euphemism to disguise what is presumably a marriage of convenience (184). In reality, Winifred is much more preoccupied with her brother's life than she is with her husband's, in part because she expects to share in his ultimate political success: 

Richard consulted Winifred about everything, because she was the one who sympathized with him, propped him up, encouraged him generally. She was the one who propped him up socially, who promoted his interests in what she considered the right quarters…[t]hey'd both decided that Richard was the man of the future, and that the woman standing behind him—didn't every successful man have one of those—was her (331). 

At the end of the novel, Iris suggests that Winifred's support extended even to helping conceal Richard's sexualexploitation of Laura.

Iris's first impressions of Winifred are of someone who is stylish but also rather tacky and superficial. Nevertheless, she is initially intimidated by the forceful way in which Winifred attempts to make her over into a fitting wife for Richard (like her brother, Winifred tends to treat Iris with condescension). Winifred's show of kindness, however, lasts only as long as it is useful; once Iris learns the truth about Richard's actions and demands a separation, Winifred becomes angry and vengeful, ultimately succeeding in obtaining custody of Iris's daughter Aimee.

Norval Chase is Laura and Iris's father, and the heir to his father Benjamin's fortune and business. As the eldest son, he likely would have inherited Chase Industries regardless, but his two younger brothers died in World War I. These deaths, as well as his wartime injuries, radically alter Norval's personality; once an idealistic young man, Norval becomes disillusioned and angry, alternately drinking and having affairs in an effort to escape his traumatic memories. He retains a core integrity, however, which ultimately leads him into financial trouble: 

[h]e ought to have shut down the factoriesin response to lessened demand [during the Depression]; he ought to have banked his money—hoarded it, as others in his position were doing. That would have been the sensible thing. But he didn't do that. He couldn't bear to. He couldn't bear to throw his men out of work. He owed them allegiance, these men of his (167).

Norval's wife, Liliana, is serious-minded, selfless, and devout; before marriage, she worked as a schoolteacher for poor children, and after her husband's return from war, she patiently endures his infidelity and temper. She dies following the miscarriage of what would have been her third child, underscoring themes surrounding gender and the sexual exploitation of women.

The assassin is one of the main characters in the science-fiction story told by the unnamed man (i.e. Alex) to his lover. The assassin was formerly one of Sakiel-Norn's child carpet-makers, and the intricacy of the work caused him to lose his sight. He was then sold to a brothel, before ultimately becoming one of the city's blind, hired killers. At the time the story opens, he has been tasked with killing the girl slated for sacrifice to the Goddess of the Five Moons, taking her place, and then killing the king of Sakiel-Norn during the sacrificial ceremony. The moment the assassin finds the girl, however, he falls in love with her, and escapes with her from the city. This makes him, in many ways, a fictional proxy for Alex, who at one point tries to persuade Iris to leave her husband. On a broader level, however, the blind assassin also symbolizes the unforeseen and often deadly consequences of human action, and even the "blind" cruelty of history itself.

The mute girl is the other protagonist of the story-within-a-story-within-a-story. She has grown up within the Temple of the Goddess, being groomed for the day of her sacrifice, and her tongue has been cut out to prevent her from screaming. The story opens the day before the ceremony, which she spends in the "Bed of One Night," waiting to be raped. When the assassin appears instead, she falls in love with him and joins him in fleeing Sakiel-Norn. The girl's status as a sacrificial virgin aligns her with both Iris and Laura, though in different ways. Laura, of course, sexually "sacrifices" herself to Richard, but Alex's comparison of the Temple girls' appearance to "pampered society bride[s]" also evokes Iris's loveless marriage to Richard, and the role it was meant to play in saving Chase Industries (29). The girl's muteness is similarly suggestive, and prompts readers to consider the ways in which the Chase sisters are silenced or (in the case of Iris's decision to publish The Blind Assassin under Laura's name) silence themselves.

Reenie is the main servant in the Chase household: she begins working for the family as a teenager, serves as a nursemaid to Laura and Iris, and ultimately takes over the running of Avilion. She also functions as a mother figure to the Chase girls after Liliana Chase's death, dispensing advice on proper womanly behavior and the dangers of men. Reenie's worldly, no-nonsense attitude actually conceals softhearted and romantic tendencies; she idolizes both Norval and Liliana, and her descriptions of the world outside Avilion are fanciful, "full of criminals and anarchists and sinister Orientals with opium pipes, thin moustaches like twisted rope and long pointed fingernails, and dope fiends and white slavers" (152). Reenie dies shortly after Iris moves away from her husband, but nevertheless provides a "running commentary" in Iris's head, as well as in the novel itself (504).

Myra is Reenie's daughter, who feels she has "inherited [Iris] from Reenie" (57). Although Reenie has a full-time job running a gift-shop, she and her boyfriend Walter take care of Iris in her old age, doing household chores, chauffeuring her from place to place, and (in Myra's case) reminding her to eat. Myra has inherited her mother's vivid imagination, and frequently nags Iris about the dangerous situations she might get herself into. Iris resents this, as well as her sense of being shuttled around "like a letter—deposited here, collected there" (169). Underneath it all, however, she appreciates Myra and Walter's efforts to take care of her, saying she, "believe[s], in some childish, faith-filled corner of myself, that Walter might yet take out his pliers and his ratchet set" to "restore" her (66).

Aimee is Iris's daughter by Alex, though she conceals the child's true paternity from Richard, Winifred, and the rest of her family. Aimee has a troubled childhood from which she never really recovers. As a young girl, she resents Iris for separating from Richard and depriving her of her privileged lifestyle; after Winifred takes custody of her and attempts to turn her against Iris, she becomes even more unhappy and confused, ultimately "turn[ing] to various chemical forms of comfort, and flay[ing] herself with one man after another" (434). Shortly before her death, Aimee (believing herself to be the child of Laura and Alex) accuses Iris of conspiring to conceal the true circumstances of her birth. 

Sabrina is Aimee's daughter, and thus Iris and Alex's granddaughter. Winifred was able to gain custody of Sabrina after Aimee's death, and Iris often daydreams about her, speculating that she may be travelling or volunteering abroad. By the end of the novel, Iris says she has come to realize that she has written the account for Sabrina, since she is "the one—the only one—who needs it now" (513). Iris's ideas about Sabrina turn out to have been correct, since her own obituary confirms that Iris is "survived by her granddaughter Sabrina Griffen, who has just returned from abroad" (519). In many ways, Sabrina represents Iris's hope for the future.

Callie Fitzsimmons is the artist who designs the Weary Soldier statue for the War Memorial in Port Ticonderoga. She is twenty-eight at the time we meet her, and she becomes Norval Chase's long-term mistress in the wake of Liliana's death. Callie is high-spirited and friendly, though somewhat artificial and hypocritical; as the years go on, she begins to profess socialist sympathies, but these do not initially prevent her from socializing with Norval and other high-society industrialists (eventually, she and Norval do have a falling out over politics).Her main significance to the novel, however, is as a possible informant: Richard bails her out of jail after she is arrested for agitating, and he uses his connection to her to prove to Laura that he knows Alex's whereabouts. Callie herself denies having turned on Alex, and the question of who is lying is never fully resolved.