Gaston Cleric

Cleric is the first person Jim meets who treats intellectual passion as a serious vocation, and his late-night conversations about poetry and Italy open a world Jim never knew existed. He is a man of squandered gifts — Jim suspects his bursts of imaginative talk may have cost him the poetry he might have written — and this quiet tragedy gives him a melancholy that draws Jim in. He matters because he represents the road Jim might take away from Black Hawk, and the tension between that road and the pull of Jim's own past is the novel's central question.