Teresa

Teresa is the central character of the novel, and her personality emerges less through action than through reflection. She is defined by her impulse to revisit, reconsider, and reinterpret experience, whether in her notebooks, in her conversations, or in the act of narration itself. Rather than presenting herself as a decisive protagonist moving events forward, she is a figure preoccupied with meaning: what past choices signify, what memories reveal, and what her observations might disclose about culpability, time, and identity.

Her defining quality is this intense self-analysis. Teresa often directs her attention toward her own mental processes, asking what she thinks and also how and why she comes to think it. The hall-of-mirrors metaphor exemplifies her character: she cannot stabilise her sense of self because she sees herself reflected in multiple, overlapping perspectives. This tendency makes her narration at times ponderous and self-indulgent, but it also constitutes her...