A university lecturer and book reviewer who represents Dublin's educated, anglicized middle class. Gabriel is kind, well-meaning, and fundamentally insulated from genuine experience by his intelligence and his careful management of every social situation. His discovery that Gretta once loved Michael Furey — a boy who died at seventeen with more passion than Gabriel has ever felt — shatters his self-regard and opens him to the collection's final, transcendent vision. He is the paralyzed man who, in the last pages, begins to see beyond paralysis into something that includes both the living and the dead.

A Galway woman living in Dublin, Gretta carries within her the memory of Michael Furey — a boy who loved her with an intensity that Gabriel, for all his education and care, has never approached. She is not a symbol; she is a woman with an interior life her husband has never accessed. When 'The Lass of Aughrim' triggers her memory, the gulf between her inner world and Gabriel's assumptions about their marriage becomes the story's devastating revelation. Joyce modeled her partly on Nora Barnacle and the boy who died was drawn from Nora's real history.

A young Dublin woman who has promised to leave Ireland with her sailor lover Frank but cannot move when the moment comes. Eveline is not weak-willed — she is the product of a system (Catholic duty, domestic obligation, paternal violence, economic dependence) that has never allowed her to develop the capacity for choice. Her paralysis at the dock is the collection's central image: the body that cannot act even when the mind knows it should.

A bank cashier who has organized his life to exclude all emotional risk. When Mrs Sinico reaches for intimacy, he retreats. When he reads of her death four years later — killed by a train, drinking, alone — he recognizes that his 'rectitude' was a form of cowardice that contributed to her destruction. Duffy is paralysis as philosophy: a man who has made a principle of his inability to feel, and who discovers too late that the principle was a lie.

An unnamed boy — possibly the same character at different ages, possibly different boys — who serves as the collection's first consciousness. He is observant, sensitive, and already forming the habit of constructing romantic narratives out of ordinary experience (the chalice in 'Araby,' the adventure quest in 'An Encounter'). His epiphanies are the collection's most emotionally raw because he has not yet learned to defend against them.

An aging spinster who works in a laundry for reformed prostitutes and visits the Donnelly family on Halloween. Maria is the collection's gentlest character and its most heartbreaking: small, kind, invisible, unaware of how much life has passed her by. When she touches the saucer of clay (death) at the Halloween game, and when she skips the verse about suitors in her song, the reader sees what Maria cannot — the life she never lived and does not know she missed.

Thomas Chandler is a clerk who reads poetry and dreams of literary fame. His encounter with the worldly Gallaher, returned from London, briefly inflames his ambition before his crying baby and his wife's contempt extinguish it. Chandler embodies the paralysis of unfulfilled artistic aspiration — a man whose talent is real enough to cause suffering but not large enough to overcome the circumstances that suppress it.