- The narrator is a writer who claims his parents named him John but begins the book by stating "Call me Jonah", alluding to the first line of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick ("Call me Ishmael"); beyond the first page, neither name is mentioned again.[9] He describes the events in the book with humorous and sarcastic detail. While writing a book about the day of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, he becomes involved with the Hoenikker children. Eventually, he is offered the presidency of San Lorenzo by Franklin Hoenikker.
- Felix Hoenikker is the "Father of the Atom Bomb" and an unseen character who died many years before the novel's plot begins. Felix Hoenikker was proclaimed one of the smartest scientists on Earth. An eccentric and emotionless man, he is depicted as amoral and apathetic towards anything other than his research. He needed only something to keep him busy, such as in his role as one of the "Fathers of the Atomic Bomb", and in his creation of "ice-nine", a potentially catastrophic substance with the capability to destroy all life on Earth, but which he saw merely as a mental puzzle (a Marine general suggested developing a substance that could solidify mud so that soldiers could run across it more easily). During experiments with "ice nine", Felix took a nap in his rocking chair and died. The narrator's quest for biographical details about Hoenikker provides both the background and the connecting thread between the various subsections of the story.
- Emily Hoenikker was the wife of Felix, and mother to Frank, Angela, and Newt. She died in childbirth with the latter. According to Dr. Asa Breed, a former lover of Emily's, the complications at Newt's birth were the result of a pelvic injury she sustained in a car accident some time before.
- Dr. Asa Breed is Felix Hoenikker's former supervisor. He takes the narrator around Illium and to the General Forge and Foundry Company where the late Felix worked. Later in the tour, Dr. Breed becomes upset with the narrator for misrepresenting scientists.[10]
- Marvin Breed is Asa Breed's brother. He owned and operated the tombstone shop in the city where Felix Hoenikker worked on the atomic bomb. Here, the narrator is shocked to find a tombstone with his own last name on it.
- Newton "Newt" Hoenikker: The dwarf ("midget") son of famed scientist Felix Hoenikker, and a painter. He is the brother of both Frank and Angela Hoenikker. His main hobby is painting minimalist abstract works. He briefly had an affair with a Ukrainian dwarf dancer named Zinka, who turned out to be a KGB agent sent to steal ice-nine for the Soviet Union.
- Franklin "Frank" Hoenikker is Felix Hoenikker's older son, and a Major General in San Lorenzo. He is the brother of Newt and Angela Hoenikker. He is an utterly technically minded person who is unable to make decisions except for giving technical advice. His main hobby is building models. Expected to take over for "Papa" Monzano after his death, he anxiously hands the presidency over to the narrator instead.
- Angela Hoenikker Conners is Felix Hoenikker's daughter and a clarinetist. She is the married sister of Frank and Newt Hoenikker. In contrast to her dwarf brother, Angela is unusually tall for a woman. She used to take care of her father after her mother's death and acts as a mother figure to Newt. She and her brothers all have samples of ice-nine, which they found along with their father's body, dead in his chair. It is implied that she used ice-nine to bargain a marriage with her husband. She dies when she blows on a clarinet contaminated with ice-nine after the apocalyptic event at the end of the novel.
- Bokonon (birth name Lionel Boyd Johnson) co-founded San Lorenzo as a republic, along with Earl McCabe (a now-dead US Marine deserter), and created the religion of Bokononism, which he asked McCabe to outlaw in order to give it an alluringly forbidden sense of mystery, giving some meaning to the miserable lives of San Lorenzo's extremely impoverished citizens. He therefore has lived for years in exile somewhere in San Lorenzo's jungles. He only appears once in the novel in person: in the very final chapter.
- "Papa" Monzano is the ailing dictator of San Lorenzo. He was once Earl McCabe's right-hand man and chosen successor. He appoints Frank Hoenikker as his own successor, and then commits suicide with a piece of ice-nine. He is the adopted father of Mona Monzano.
- Mona Aamons Monzano is the 18-year-old adopted daughter of "Papa" Monzano. A gorgeous black girl with blond hair due to her Finnish biological father, her adoption was a political ploy to integrate different races under Monzano's rule and provide a beloved poster child for his regime. The narrator describes her as "the only beautiful woman on San Lorenzo". She is expected to marry Monzano's successor, and she therefore agrees to marry the narrator before the disaster at the end of the novel.
- Julian Castle is the multi-millionaire ex-owner of Castle Sugar Cooperation, whom the narrator travels to San Lorenzo to interview for a magazine. He eventually changed his outlook in life, abandoning his business ventures to set up and operate a humanitarian hospital in the jungle of San Lorenzo.
- H. Lowe Crosby is a fervently pro-American bicycle manufacturer the narrator meets on his plane ride to San Lorenzo. His main goal is to move his American factory to San Lorenzo, so he can run it with cheap labor.
- Hazel Crosby is the wife of H. Lowe Crosby, a Hoosier who believes in some cosmic fraternity among Hoosiers and asks all Hoosiers she meets around the globe to call her "Mom".
- Philip Castle is the son of Julian Castle, and the operator of a hotel on San Lorenzo. He also wrote a history of San Lorenzo that the narrator reads on his flight to the island. Bokonon taught both him and Mona when they were young students. Through reading the index of Castle's book, Claire Minton deduces that he's a homosexual.
- Horlick Minton is the new American ambassador to San Lorenzo, whom the narrator meets on his plane ride. He was blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer during the McCarthy era.
- Claire Minton is the wife of the new American ambassador to San Lorenzo, and is a writer of book indexes. She is so well versed at indexing that she even claims to be able to deduce strange knowledge about writers based on reading their indexes. She and her husband are extremely close, forming what the narrator calls a duprass.
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