Other Voices, Other Rooms Characters

Our hero, Joel Harrison Knox, is an imaginative (read: pathological liar) thirteen-year-old from New Orleans who's hit a rough patch. His mother has just died and, after living with his aunt Ellen...

The first description of Idabel Thompkins tells you almost everything you need to know: It was a girl with fiery dutchboy hair. She was about his height, and wore a pair of brown shorts and a y...

Randolph is a really difficult figure to pin down, in almost every way. He, like Idabel, seems to float between genders. He can be terribly unfeeling and mean but also quite sensitive and kind. Som...

Wicked Stepmother? Miss Amy is Joel's father's new wife, his stepmother. Though she doesn't really seem to have that much of a relationship with Mr. Sansom after all. Her primary relationship isn'...

Zoo is one of the servants at Skully's Landing, and she represents the suffering of women at the hands of brutal men. We first meet her as she prepares breakfast for Joel on his first morning at th...

A Sociable Hermit Little Sunshine is a hermit. He is not as antisocial as hermits often have a reputation of being, however; he and Randolph are, according to Randolph, anyway, "dear friends" (1.5...

Older than the Hills Jesus Fever is, according to the narrator, […] a kind of gnomish little Negro whose primitive face was sharp against the drowning green sky. […H]is eyes, yellow feeble...

Florabel is Idabel's twin sister, but the similarity stops there. In fact, the girls are polar opposites. Florabel tells Joel, "We were born twins, like I told you, but Mama says the Lord always se...

Poor Ed Sansom, Joel's father, doesn't seem to know what hit him; neither do we, really. He's a mysterious figure at first, populating Joel's wild imagination. He fantasizes that his father, whom h...

Joel visits Noon City twice over the course of the novel, and that's where we meet some interesting characters like Miss Roberta Velma Lacey, owner of R. V. Lacey's Princely Place, who takes a shin...