World War Z Characters

The Interviewer is a bit of an enigma. Scratch that, huge enigma. He's the only character to appear in every chapter of World War Z, but he has the least amount of concrete evidence for our charact...

Appearing in a mind-boggling four sections, more than any other character, Todd Wainio is perhaps the closest World War Z has to a central character (besides the Interviewer). We follow him as an i...

At the end of Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Spock sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise, stating "the needs of the many out weight the needs of the few." Paul Redeker must have been a huge Sp...

General Travis D'Ambrosia is Todd Wainio's upper-management counterpart in World War Z. Whereas Todd gives us the details on what it means to be a grunt in the zombie wars, Travis lets us in on wha...

Dr. Kwang Jingshu is a medical doctor in China and witness to one of the first known zombie attacks of the zombie war. As a character, his purpose is to set up many of the novel's various aspects....

Nury is a smuggler who helps refugees escape China in the early days of the outbreak. As a character, he doesn't get much development beyond a love of money that turns sour as he witnesses more and...

Stanley MacDonald is a member of the Third Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. During a routine drug interdiction operation, MacDonald and his team come across the aftermath o...

Fernando Oliveria is an illegal heart surgeon in Brazil. Fernando doesn't get much characterization beyond his pride and a devil-may-care attitude, but, like Nury Televaldi before him, his purpose...

Jurgen Warmbrunn and Paul Knight are both spies—although less "bang, bang shoot-em up" and more "sit at a computer for hours doing research." (Now that's our type of spy.) Both men gather enough...

Saladin Kadar lived in Kuwait City during the initial outbreaks. Since his family became refugees during the "'67 War of Zionist aggression," Saladin didn't exactly have the highest opinion of Isra...

Bob Archer is the director the Central Intelligence Agency—which for some reason is still located in Langley, Virginia despite the fact that everything east of the Rookies was abandoned in the zo...

Scott is the evil mastermind behind Phalanx, a vaccine for rabies. Since people thought at first that the zombie virus was a form of rabies, he carefully advertised his product, hinted that it woul...

Carlson Grover is Uncle Sam on opposite day. He embodies all the critiques the novel wants to throw at government and bureaucracy. We'd like to analyze this character for you, but he pretty much pr...

Mary Jo Miller was just your common, everyday housewife before the zombie invasion came to her little suburb. Then she turned into your common, everyday zombie decapitator.Mary Jo's story of everyd...

Sharon is a patient at the Rothman Rehabilitation Home for Feral Children. Although an adult now, she survived the Great Panic and subsequent zombie wars as only a wee child.Sharon's story really s...

Sure, they live in totally different countries and wouldn't do well on a blind date together, but we're including Maria and Philip in the same character analysis because they play off each other so...

As a character, Jesika Hendricks doesn't do much during the Great Panic. Not her fault, she was only a child at the time, and children don't always fare well against zombie hordes. But as an adult...

In the pre-zombie war chapters, you might have noticed that bureaucracy doesn't get much love. We sure did. The novel paints a picture of bureaucracy as slow and inefficient and shows bureaucrats a...

Remember Carlson Grover? Guy was a jerk wasn't he? He also represented all the problems the novel has with politicians who abuse the political systems for their own ends. Well, the novel has two fo...

There isn't a lot of discussion of art in World War Z—probably because it's hard to find the time to snuggle up with a good book while a zombie swarm tries to snuggle up to you. Still, the novel...

You might have noticed that the book tends to promote old-world values and beliefs over those of the modern world. Todd Wainio's story very clearly states that old-school military tactics needed to...

Truthfully, Senor Alvarez isn't much of a character, and we can't really say much about him besides that his office has a rockin' view of the sunset. But the story he recounts provides an important...

Religion isn't something World War Z spends a lot of time with, but it does raise a few religious queries here and there. Enter Father Sergei Ryzhkov.Father Ryzhkov starts the war as a man of littl...

The ChairpersonThis is the guy who doesn't like the Interviewer's original report because it had "'[t]oo many opinions, too many feelings'" (1.1.3). The chairperson has the Interviewer edit out the...