Narrator

The first person narrator is an unidentified individual of indiscriminate age and origin. Though they maintain narrative authority throughout the short story, they remain a disembodied and spectral figure throughout the piece. At the story's start, they set out to accomplish an inexplicit endeavor. They do not identify this endeavor until the end of the story. What they hope to accomplish with the tale of Salvatore's life, is to hold their reader's attention as they craft "the portrait of a man" who is ordinary but possesses the rare capacity for goodness (5). Though the narrator says that they know Salvatore, and although they have intimate knowledge of his entire life, by the end of the story, the narrator appears indistinguishable from the author himself. The author, however, leaves this relationship between the narrator and himself up to the reader's interpretation.

Salvatore

Salvatore is the main character of the story...