Galatea 2.2 characters

Appears from the start

A novelist who shares the author's name and much of his publication history. After years in the Netherlands and the end of a long relationship, Richard returns to the American university town where he was once a student. He feels estranged from both academic literary study and his own earlier books.

Appears from the start

Richard's former partner, identified only by an initial. Their years together in the United States and Europe are reconstructed throughout his account. Her absence shapes his return to the university and his effort to understand how lived experience became entangled with the fiction he wrote during their relationship.

First appears in chapter 2

A cognitive scientist at the university's advanced research center. Brilliant, combative, and impatient with claims that literature belongs beyond scientific explanation, Lentz recruits Richard to help train a neural network for an unusual contest involving the English department's comprehensive examination.

First appears in chapter 6

The name given to the neural network implementation that begins developing a sustained command of language. Helen learns through conversations and an improvised course of literary reading, becoming the most promising result of Richard and Lentz's collaboration.

First appears in chapter 5

A young student whom Richard knows through his return to university life and identifies only by an initial. Her interest in literature and her conversations with him become part of the human world that he describes to Helen, while Richard's feelings toward her complicate his memories of C.

First appears in chapter 2

A scientist associated with the research center and one of the colleagues surrounding Lentz's neural-network project. Diana helps Richard navigate a technical culture in which he is both collaborator and outsider.

First appears in chapter 3

A researcher at the center whose work and conversation contribute to Richard's education in the competing scientific accounts of mind. He belongs to the interdisciplinary community observing Lentz's experiment.

First appears in chapter 9

Lentz's wife, whose severe neurological condition is disclosed only after Richard has worked with him for some time. Her condition gives a private urgency to Lentz's interest in consciousness and to his refusal to treat the neural-network project as merely a game between academic disciplines.