Dr. Louise Banks

Dr. Banks is the story’s central character, its narrator and protagonist. She is a linguistic scientist, specializing in the study of languages – how they’re formed, how they function as communication, and how they are simultaneously similar and different in terms of both intention and practice. She is intelligent, insightful, generally practical, and on occasion somewhat witty: there are moments of clever banter in the conversations she has with her colleagues on the project to which she is assigned early in the narrative – establishing and maintaining communication with a race of visiting aliens.

Dr. Banks’ commitment to, and discoveries within, the alien communication project define and motivate the story’s primary narrative line. That line also contains explorations of how Dr. Banks is personally changed by her experiences on that project – specifically, how her understanding of time, and her interaction with it, both become something...