A friend who comes to dinner, debates the composition of a novel, and recalls an entry about Uqbar in the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia.

Born in Turkestan, raised in the city of Merv, and trained as a dyer, an occupation that heavily influenced his eventual extravagant and heretical career.

A cruel ruler who demands daily magical illusions from a captive, ultimately ordering the execution of a masked figure who turns out to be Yakub.

An enigmatic, continually veiled figure who appears in the magical visions and is revealed to be staring at his own face before his execution.

An aging, honest-looking man who tells the true story of the night the Yardmaster was murdered, explaining his choice to walk away from violence.

An older, hardworking carpenter who seeks out a fatal duel with Rufino Aguilera to avenge his honor after his woman, Casilda, leaves him.

Rosendo Juárez's fierce companion who hands him a knife and expects him to fight the Yardmaster.

A swaggering, drunken stranger from up north who challenges Rosendo at a dance and is later stabbed in the back.

The most famous hero of the New York City underworld and the leader of a gang of twelve hundred men.

A man recovering from near-fatal septicemia who leaves the sanatorium to travel by train to convalesce in the country.

A violent, historical military figure who converses with Rosas in the afterlife, expressing his lack of fear and his readiness for a new destiny.

A cynical, former ruler conversing with Quiroga in the afterlife, viewing their spectral existence as someone else's dream.

A young man possessing a monstrous, infallible memory who perceives a dizzying, multiform, and precise world, leaving him unable to sleep or think in abstractions.

A man living in strict, self-imposed seclusion, waiting for the morning of August 25 to carry out the assassination of the president of Uruguay.

The president of Uruguay who is shot by Avelino Arredondo after a Te Deum.

A professor of Old English at the University of Texas, described as a polite but strict academic of old Puritan stock.

An emaciated, multilingual dealer from Smyrna who sells Pope's Iliad to the princess de Lucinge.

Orchestrator of the plan to have the rustic Orton impersonate the missing gentleman Tichborne by relying on pure unlikeness.

An irrepressible, fat rustic who impersonates the slim and genteel Roger Charles Tichborne under Bogle's direction.

A lonely woman living in a majestic Paris hôtel particulier who happily accepts Tom Castro as her prodigal son, ignoring his obvious flaws.

The elder of the tough, red-headed Nilsen brothers who brings Juliana Burgos home to live with him.

A woman brought home by Cristian Nilsen who serves the brothers and inadvertently creates a volatile dynamic between them.

The formidable boss of El Suspiro who employs progressive humiliation to trap Otálora into a false sense of power before executing him.

A youth who attempts to usurp Bandeira's power, horse, and woman, only to realize at the moment of his death that he has been permitted to do so as a cruel joke.

Bandeira's taciturn capanga who pretends to help Otálora usurp control but is actually complicit in his downfall.

A sergeant who corners a fierce outlaw but, recognizing his own destiny as a wolf rather than a dog, joins the outlaw in fighting his own soldiers.

A fierce deserter who fights off Cruz's soldiers in the dark until Cruz recognizes him as a kindred spirit and joins his side.

A young mill worker who orchestrates her own defilement as part of a complex, successful plan to murder Aaron Loewenthal and avenge her father's suicide.

The man Emma Zunz shoots and frames for her own rape in order to extract vengeance for her father.

The condemned subdirector of the Tarnowitz concentration camp who justifies his actions and the psychological destruction of David Jerusalem as a tragic necessity.

A brilliant Sephardic Jewish poet driven to insanity by the severe, calculated regime of Otto Dietrich zur Linde.

The jovial, pompous owner of the cellar containing the Aleph, who boasts of his magnificent observatory.

A Roman tribune who leads an expedition into uncharted deserts to find the secret City of the Immortals after hearing a dying rider's tale.

The young queen of the Yahoo tribe who offers herself to the missionary and marks him with royal favor.

Four individuals who effectively rule the Yahoo tribe, possess minor foresight, and select the mutilated king.

The narrator who encounters an older version of himself in Room 19 of a hotel, and later retreats to Adrogué as the world succumbs to Tlön.

A wounded traveler who arrives at a Roman camp seeking the secret river that purifies men of death.

A councilor who feigns debauchery to lower his enemy's guard before leading forty-seven Rônins in a night raid.

A highly trained Irish poet tasked by the high king to sing his victory at the Battle of Clontarf.

The victorious high king who commands his poet to immortalize his deeds in words.

Issues an imperial decree commanding his admiral to ruthlessly punish a pirate fleet.

A man driven to the brink of madness after discovering blue disks that unpredictably multiply and disappear, defying mathematical laws.

An illustrious, dying poet who achieves a final epiphany about the limitations of his art upon seeing a yellow rose.

Clara's husband who served as the Argentine ambassador to Canada before resigning and dying shortly after.

A detective who uses geometric reasoning to predict crimes, but is lured into a deadly trap at Villa Triste-le-Roy.

A commissioner who receives an equilateral triangle map and communicates with Lönnrot regarding the crimes.

A famous Barcelona gangster operating in the south of the city who orchestrates a complex series of fake crimes to trap and kill Lönnrot.

A rabbi and insomniac writer who was stabbed to death by Azevedo while working at his typewriter.

A successful criminal and Southern gentleman who preached the Scriptures while his gang stole horses.

A Lombard barbarian warrior who deserted his army to defend the city of Ravenna and died doing so.

An academic who experiences fleeting, unsettling memories of another man's life.

A gang leader who plans a factory robbery but is betrayed and shot point-blank by the police.

A member of Ferrari's gang who is killed alongside him in the police ambush.

An immortal who wandered through new realms and empires for centuries, experiencing perfect quietude and viewing all human acts as exact compensations.

A Jewish author arrested by the Gestapo in Prague and sentenced to death by firing squad.

The officer who reads about Hladik's preeminence and sentences him to death.

The leader of a rival gang that goes to war with Monk Eastman's crew.

A tall figure with a bull's head who wears a mask because his face blinds those who look upon it.

A scrawny New York kid who became a fearsome frontiersman and cattle rustler, indulging in anger until he was killed by Pat Garrett.

An elderly woman and living archive of Argentine history who dies shortly after her house is stormed by a mob.

A tall American student who lives among Native Americans to learn their secret doctrine but ultimately refuses to reveal it to academia.

An older professor who coldly receives Murdock's decision to withhold the tribal secret he discovered.

A seventy-year-old professor and writer from 1897 Buenos Aires who finds himself conversing with a man in the distant future.

A nameless, four-hundred-year-old man in a futuristic society who explains to Eudoro the obsolescence of printing, cities, and history.

A mysterious man who arrives at ancient circular ruins with the singular, obsessive goal of dreaming a man into existence.

The authoritative leader who suddenly commands the destruction of the Congress's amassed library, realizing the Congress is the world itself.

An Irish rebel leader who, after being exposed as a traitor, agrees to a choreographed theatrical assassination to inspire the rebellion.

The man who uncovers Kilpatrick's treachery and orchestrates his public execution as a plagiarized Shakespearean drama.

A foreign-born historian proposed to copy Bolivar's letters, competing with the narrator for the mission.

An author of formally complex, often frustrating literary works like 'April March', 'The Secret Mirror', and 'Statements', who believes readers are extinct.

A traveling salesman from Liverpool who morbidly obsesses over Miss Thrale and imagines himself as the playwright Wilfred Quarles in Quain's play.

An observer or theorist who suggests that the vast Library is pointless and could be replaced by a single infinite volume of infinitely thin pages.

A genius novelist and man of letters with mystical leanings who dedicated his life to creating a labyrinthine, chaotic novel that explores the infinite bifurcations of time.

An old man with an indomitable face who deciphers and explains the structure of Ts'ui Pen's novel and the concept of forking time.

A coward who betrayed his comrade and has been narrating the story under the guise of the betrayed man, ultimately begging his listener (Borges) to despise him.

A man who explains the mechanics of memory recovery to the narrator during a long, sleepless night of discussion.

A victorious pirate commander who leads a massive fleet of junks and prepares a desperate defense against the Emperor's punitive expedition.

A woman obsessed with the absolute perfection of ephemeral fashion, imposing an exhausting, orthodox discipline upon her appearances until her death.

A prisoner from Sind or Gujarat who died in his cell after painting an infinite, dizzying image of a magical tiger that covered the walls, floor, and ceiling.

The last priest of the Pyramid of Qaholom, tortured and imprisoned in a dark hemisphere, who seeks to decipher a divine message written in the spots of a jaguar.

Author of 'Kristus och Judas' and 'Den hemlige frälsaren' who proposed that Judas' betrayal was an act of limitless, hyperbolic asceticism, debasing his spirit to seek hell.

A Danish Hebrew scholar who wrote a lukewarm foreword to Runeberg's book. Later revealed to have written a letter from Ouro Preto explaining the mystery of the invention of Tlön.

A man from familiar streets who tasted death and transformed into the memory of a knife.

An accommodating man who falsely claims to be Roger Charles Tichborne to Lady Tichborne, invoking fake memories to prove his identity.

The respectful black servant of Tom Castro who smiles discreetly as the deception of Lady Tichborne succeeds.

A Scottish Presbyterian from the Orkneys who sells an infinite, monstrous book to the narrator.

A pensioner who trades his money and a Wyclif Bible for an infinite book, becoming a miserable prisoner to his horrific, impossible acquisition.

An uncivil and iniquitous Japanese courtier whose actions brought about the death of the lord of Ako and who refused to die honorably.

A fatalist, atheist, and reclusive Memphis millionaire who, in 1824, financed the creation of a systematic encyclopedia of the illusory planet Tlön.

A modest contributor to Orbis Tertius who received Volume Eleven of the Tlön encyclopedia.

The narrator's traveling companion who purchased a mysteriously heavy Tlönian metal cone in Cuchilla Negra.

A grave young woman from Balvanera whose fear of mirrors drove her insane, believing the narrator's reflection was magically stalking her.