Kate

Kate is a 24-year-old British woman and the central character/protagonist. Kate’s defining characteristic is her lack of defining characteristics: throughout the novel she looks outside of herself, to other people and to material objects, in a quest for a sense of self-definition that she seems unable to discover by looking within herself. Kate’s tendency to live up to other people’s expectations for her, rather than pursuing the things that she wants to pursue, is introduced from the outset of the novel through an exploration of her academic qualifications and achievements. She describes her graduate qualifications in terms that make them seem like a burden rather than an achievement or a goal: “a master’s degree completed dutifully, pointlessly; a commitment to a Ph.D. made miserably, uncertainly” (4). Kate’s arrival in New York city corresponds with her casting off her old self-definitions, made via...