Protagonist

Character Role Analysis

Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

This book is all about Howie and how he fares and flails in NYC after WWII. A pseudo-memoir told from Campbell's point of view, the novel gives us a hodge-podge look at life undercover as a fake Nazi. Things get for dicey for us, though, because how can you root for a guy who has so much blood on his hands?

Campbell's kind of an antihero with his own winding conscience, which he compares to gears in a clock. Other dudes like Jones and Eichmann might willfully mess with the "teeth" of their knowledge gears, but not Campbell:

Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself—will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows, some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history —But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without.' (38.64-65)

Whatever is wrong with his own thinking, Campbell concludes, it's not because he's playing favorites with the facts of the universe. He's at least honest with himself, more or less, and that's something we do like to see in heroes, even if in every other way they kind of make us feel creepy.