# In the Midst of Life — Character guide

> Key figures in In the Midst of Life by Ambrose Bierce.

- [Peyton Farquhar](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/peyton_farquhar.md): Farquhar is a wealthy secessionist whose imperious circumstances kept him out of the Confederate army, leaving him chafing for distinction on his own plantation. When a gray-clad rider shares news of Owl Creek bridge and
- [Jerome Searing](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/private_searing.md): Searing is a reconnaissance man whose mission collapses when a splintered post leaves him wedged in debris, only his right arm partly free. He hears a voice tell him he is caught like a rat in a trap, yet his first insti
- [Carter Druse](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/carter_druse.md): Druse lies hidden above a valley, watching a stately rider who is both an enemy and his father, recalling the parting command to do what he conceives to be his duty. He trembles, nearly swoons, then steadies himself and 
- [Parker Adderson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/parker_adderson.md): Adderson is a sergeant caught in enemy uniform, brought before a Confederate general for what amounts to a capital trial in a candlelit tent. He answers questions with dry wit, concedes he is a spy, and treats his own ex
- [Captain Downing Madwell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/captain_madwell.md): Madwell is a daring, honorable captain whose closest friend, Sergeant Caffal Halcrow, lies mutilated and screaming in a ravine after a disastrous charge. The major, Halcrow's brother, is Madwell's bitter enemy, and the r
- [Herman Brayle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/lieutenant_brayle.md): Brayle is the general's newest aide, a scholar and gentleman whose conspicuous uniform and reckless gallantry make him a spectacle wherever he goes. Ordered to carry a message the long way, he instead canters into the en
- [Murlock](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/murlock.md): A young homesteader who nurses his fever-stricken wife to her death, then keeps a nightlong vigil beside her body in a lonely cabin.
- [Harker Brayton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/harker_brayton.md): A wealthy, idle bachelor-scholar, fresh from remote travels, who wakes in a friend's eccentric San Francisco house to find a serpent coiled beneath his bed.
- [Jefferson Doman](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/jefferson_doman.md): A destitute old man shuffling through winter snow toward the Home for Old Men, carrying a past that will not stay buried.
- [Mr. Jarette](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/jarette.md): A rational man who locks himself into a room with a corpse to test a theory, and finds his own nerves the harder puzzle.
- [Captain Ransome](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/captain_ransome.md): A Union battery commander whose order to open fire becomes the axis of a court of inquiry he cannot argue his way out of.
- [William Grayrock](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/private_grayrock.md): A young soldier praised for courage he never showed, who slips past the pickets to find the man he may or may not have shot.
- [Captain Graffenreid](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/captain_graffenreid.md): Graffenreid commands a company in the front rank of a vast army drawn up in perfect, silent formation, an unobstructed half-mile of peaceful-looking ground between him and the enemy's wood. The stillness is the trial: he
- [Gilson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/gilson.md): Milton Gilson leaves behind a will that turns a whole region into a battlefield of lawyers, false witnesses, and inflamed opinion, reaching into press, pulpit, and street corner. His monument on Mammon Hill stands as a p
- [Jack Raynor](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/jack_raynor.md): Raynor moves easily among the fashionable set, carrying news and judgments from one drawing-room to the next, and his reports on the mysterious Dr. Barritz both fascinate and unsettle the young woman writing her diary. H
- [John Hardshaw](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/john_hardshaw.md): Hardshaw arrives at the Home's gate in midwinter, ill-clad but with a strange fitness and good taste about him, and deliberately avoids the bright lamp over the main door in favor of a dimmer side entrance. The superinte
- [Richard Benning](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/richard_benning.md): Benning undertakes the reconnaissance that no skirmish line could survive, riding out in full view of thousands of hardened soldiers who watch him in suspended, almost religious silence. He is not a bravado performer but
- [Mrs. Hardshaw](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/mrs_hardshaw.md): She shares the dangers and privations of frontier life with a willing spirit, and when fever takes her there is no physician within miles and no neighbor to summon. Her husband Murlock nurses her for three days, then pre
- [Silas Tilbody](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/mr_tilbody.md): Tilbody runs the Home for Old Men with the aggrieved efficiency of a man who believes the founder's benevolence was sadly impaired by providing any inmates at all. In his private castle-in-Spain, the residents would be s
- [Dr. Helberson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/dr_helberson.md): Helberson let a colleague's contemptuous manner goad him into a wager he already regrets, and the regret sharpens every hour he waits for it to resolve. He is the moral center of the group precisely because he alone feel
- [William Mancher](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/dr_mancher.md): Mancher agreed to be the "subject" in a wager testing whether a man could endure hours alone with a dead body, and his willingness to rise from the dead and explain matters is the only escape hatch Helberson and Harper c
- [Irene Marlowe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/irene_marlowe.md): Irene has made a cheerful home of her awful isolation, finding sufficiency in light chores, her child, her husband, and a few foolish books. When she begs Marlowe not to hunt because of a dreadful dream she cannot fully 
- [Charles Marlowe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/charles_marlowe.md): Marlowe is at ease in his forest life, taking down his rifle when there is already meat enough because the day invites it. He receives his wife's solemn warning about a dream with less gravity than it deserves—he laughs,
- [Eva Maynard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/eva_maynard.md): Eva's voice—angry, impetuous, unmistakably a lady's—rises through the twilight against a man's rich, musical tones that promise she and another will suffer if she does not let things remain as they are. The eavesdropper 
- [Mary Matthews Porfer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/mary_matthews.md): A jeweled hand reaches into a dead man's coat and draws out a mouldy pocketbook — Mary Matthews Porfer, whose beauty and ruin are equally documented.
- [Captain Armisted](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/captain_armisted.md): A dark, saturnine Confederate officer with a bloodied handkerchief bound about his brow, he speaks the words that sink another man's world away from his feet.
- [Mr. Porfer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/mr_porfer.md): An ill-clad old man shuffling through winter snow toward the Home for Old Men, his rags the uniform of an army of indigence.
- [Mrs. Porfer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/mrs_porfer.md): A woman whose jeweled hand and ghastly white face — traversed by a deforming cicatrice no art could hide — mark her as both privileged and cursed.
- [Barney Bree](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/barney_bree.md): A grave digger and whisky-soaked miner whose letter to a friend — 'I've hit her hard in the boneyard' — conceals a fortune and a corpse.
- [James R. Colston](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/james_colston.md): An old man in rags, once a slaveholder, now seeking admittance to the Home for Old Men — his past a debt that poverty alone cannot settle.
- [General Cameron](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/general_cameron.md): He stands facing the distant ridge, field-glass raised, the still center of a battlefield that moves only when he speaks. His few words to an aide set skirmishers in motion and halt them again, but he withholds the order
- [Captain Hartroy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/captain_hartroy.md): Hartroy holds a field officer's command in a Cumberland defile, a promotion that still sits uneasily on a man discovered rather than born to rank. When a butternut-clad civilian passes his sentinel with a paper and a fai
- [Dramer Brune](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/dramer_brune.md): Seen indistinctly among trees near the Brownville House, Brune speaks with rich, musical anger to a woman in gray, warning that she is powerless and that both will suffer. His eyes glitter bleakly in the moonlight, and w
- [General Masterson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/general_masterson.md): Masterson commands from the fringe of the wood, motionless while his staff officers hold their glasses up and the whole line of battle stands caught in a new kind of attention. He knows that sending skirmishers would cos
- [Sergeant Halcrow](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/sergeant_halcrow.md): Caffal Halcrow enlisted in Madwell's company simply because separation from his friend was unbearable, and each has since climbed two steps up a ladder that keeps pulling them apart. His brother Creede, the regiment's cy
- [General Clavering](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/general_clavering.md): Clavering belongs to the same world of moonlit woods and Brownville House intrigue where voices carry threats and figures vanish before they can be named. His authority over subordinates gives him the power to demand pro
- [Lieutenant Price](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/lieutenant_price.md): Price belongs to that unlucky class of subordinate whose conscience outruns his rank: during the engagement he recognized the battery was firing on its own people and urged the commander to cease, only to be insulted and
- [Mrs. Farquhar](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/mrs_farquhar.md): Peyton Farquhar's devoted wife.
- [Scarry](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/scarry.md): A soldier who meets a tragic end.
- [Charles Breede](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/charles_breede.md): A deceased man whose will causes conflict.
- [Mr. Winters](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/mr_winters.md): A man who encounters a strange creature.
- [Colonel Harmon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/colonel_harmon.md): A Union colonel who makes a fateful decision.
- [Mr. Harper](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/mr_harper.md): A man who encounters a strange phenomenon.
- [Mr. Barwell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/mr_barwell.md): A man who witnesses a strange event.
- [Dr. Druring](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/dr_druring.md): A scientist who studies snakes.
- [Hurdy-Gurdy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/hurdy_gurdy.md): A dog that plays a role in a strange story.
- [Marsh](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/marsh.md): A soldier who experiences a strange vision.
- [Captain Coulter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/coulter.md): A Union officer involved in a deadly affair.
- [Mr. Brentshaw](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/mr_brentshaw.md): A man who tells a story about a ghost.
- [Baby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters/baby.md): An infant whose fate is tied to a tragic story.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/in_the_midst_of_life_se/characters