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Characters

Oedipa Maas - The novel's protagonist. After her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, dies and she becomes co-executor of his estate, she discovers and begins to unravel a worldwide conspiracy. Oedipa functions in the novel as a type of detective, trying to find out the meaning behind Trystero in the play The Courier's Tragedy.

Pierce Inverarity - Oedipa's ex-boyfriend and a wealthy real-estate tycoon. The reader never meets him directly: all encounters are presented through Oedipa's memories. At the beginning of the novel he is already dead and is said to have been extremely rich, having owned, at one time or another, a great deal of real property and holdings in California.

Wendell "Mucho" Maas - The husband of Oedipa, Mucho once worked in a used-car lot but recently became a disc jockey for KCUF radio in Kinneret, California (a fictional town). Towards the end of the novel, the effects of his nascent LSD use alienate Oedipa.

Metzger - A lawyer who works for Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus law firm. He has been assigned to help Oedipa execute Pierce's estate. He and Oedipa have an affair.

Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard - The four members of the band called The Paranoids. They serve as a means of satirizing the southern Californian youth hippie culture in the mid 1960s.

Dr. Hilarius - Oedipa's psychiatrist, who prescribes LSD, which she does not take, to Oedipa as well as other housewives. He goes crazy toward the end of the story, admitting to being a former Nazi doctor at Buchenwald, where he worked in a program focused on experimentally-induced insanity to render Jews permanently catatonic. He claims to use facial expressions as a weapon, and boasts of a face he made once that drove a subject insane. He holes up in his office, but is taken away peacefully by the police after Oedipa disarms him.

John Nefastis - A scientist obsessed with perpetual motion. He has tried to invent a type of Maxwell's demon, in an attempt to create a perpetual motion machine. Oedipa visits him to see the machine after learning about him from Stanley Koteks.

Stanley Koteks - An employee of Yoyodyne Corporation, Oedipa meets him when she wanders into his office while touring the plant. He knows something about the Trystero, but he refuses to say what he knows.

Randolph Driblette - The director of the production of Wharfinger's The Courier's Tragedy seen by Oedipa and Metzger. Driblette is a leading Wharfinger scholar, but he commits suicide before Oedipa can extract any useful information from him about Wharfinger's mention of the Tristero. Oedipa's meeting with Randolph after the play, however, sparks her to go on a quest to find the meaning behind Trystero.

Mike Fallopian - Oedipa and Metzger meet Mike Fallopian in The Scope, a bar frequented by Yoyodyne employees. He tells them about The Peter Pinguid Society. Oedipa searches him out again later.

Genghis Cohen - The most eminent philatelist in the LA area, Cohen was hired to inventory and appraise the deceased's stamp collection. Oedipa and he discuss stamps and forgeries.

Professor Bortz - Formerly of Berkeley, now teaching at San Narciso, Bortz wrote the editor's preface in a version of Wharfinger's works. Oedipa tracks him down to learn more about Trystero.