Character Analysis
We know very little about the narrator, who focuses mostly on telling us about the comrade. The narrator meets the comrade in Bologna and takes him to Romagna, "where it was necessary I go to see a man." Um, whatever you say, dude.
They have a "good trip," but the narrator isn't as hopeful about the world revolution as the comrade is. In fact, he says the Communist movement is going "very badly" in Italy. He doesn’t feel the need to deter the comrade's optimism a second time, though, instead meeting him with silence when he asserts that the revolution will take hold eventually. This higher road approach suggests maturity on the narrator's part, offering a subtle suggestion that he is older. Plus, he tells us how young the comrade is—calling him "quite young" (1), which feels a bit like marveling at his youth.
When the two men part ways, the narrator tries to talk to the comrade about Mantegna, but the comrade insists that he doesn't like Mantegna. So instead the narrator gives the young man some places to look up in Milan—you know, spots to eat, commies to rendezvous with—but the comrade isn't terribly interested in these either. The narrator has served his purpose for the young man, which again can be seen as a shout-out to age—the narrator is no longer particularly relevant.
The narrator says, "The last I heard of him the Swiss had him in jail near Sion" (8). This might be true, this might be rumor, the narrator can't be certain. And he definitely doesn't know anything about the circumstances surrounding this rumored imprisonment. What is implied, though, is some sparse connectedness—the narrator has had cause to hear about the young comrade, which coupled with their meeting and his general efforts to hook the kid up going forward, strongly implies that the narrator is a commie, too, or at least a sympathizer.
In general, though, the narrator is even more unknown to us than the comrade. He acts almost exclusively as a voice to us about the young man, while offering little-to-no information about himself. We don't even know, for instance, why he had to "see a man" in Romagna or who the man was.
Interestingly, however, the story is told in the first-person perspective. Hemingway plops us inside our narrator's head… and then tells us virtually nothing about the guy. But perhaps this is how it is in war: We meet people along the way and they make impressions on us, but before we know it, they are gone.