The Night Wanderer

Pierre L’Errant, also known as Owl in flashbacks, is the deuteragonist of the novel. As the titular “night wanderer,” Pierre is an Anishinaabe man from the Otter Lake area. Centuries previously, he was taken to France as a boy. Once there, he suffered multiple injustices and contracted a fatal case of measles. As he lay dying, a vampire came and transformed him into a vampire as well. In his interactions with the other characters on the reserve, he dresses plainly to counterbalance his extremely Anishinaabe, dark-skinned appearance and ominous vampiric aura. Additionally, various allusions to his vampiric nature are present—his skin tone is washed out, and he speaks without showing his teeth, presumably to hide fangs.

Pierre’s arc in the novel centers around his quest for his own lost humanity and history. He longs to reconnect with his past self, a young human boy named Owl, but he feels ashamed of who he has become and of the monstrous acts that he has committed to preserve his vampiric existence over the centuries. Pierre is both wise and unwise due to this internal contrast. He knows more about the world and about history than the other characters, but he also struggles to interact with others and sometimes resorts to using his vampiric charisma to get what he wants. Pierre occupies the role of a tragic hero in the novel, and at times even flirts with the role of an antagonist due to his vampiric nature. However, he is ultimately characterized as a lonely man desperate to reconnect with his own lost humanity. While his centuries of life have left him emotionally distant and callous at times, he is also thoughtful and attentive to others and to the world around him, taking time to connect with Tiffany and helping to guide her back home, both physically and emotionally.

Granny Ruth is an important secondary character who occupies a mentor role in the story. Although she mentors and guides the two protagonists in her own way, she is also characterized as a very human, round character; she loves Tiffany but does not listen to her and struggles with her own loneliness and isolation due to the slow diminishing of her Anishinaabe cultural roots and community. After the death of her husband, she has nobody left to talk in Anishinaabe anymore, and she struggles to find her place in a rapidly modernizing world. To demonstrate this internal conflict, the author regularly peppers Granny Ruth’s speech with Anishinaabe words while the other characters primarily speak English. Granny Ruth is also shown to be deeply spiritual. She is the only character stated to have a deep belief in God, particularly the ways in which God works in the natural world; her advice on these matters helps Tiffany to work through her own internal conflicts.

Granny Ruth is caring, protective, and wise. She takes care of her family by ensuring that they are well-fed and clothed, even if they do not fully appreciate her efforts; she is also welcoming and insists on helping Pierre to feel at home despite his strangeness. Despite her well-developed traits, she does not have a specific arc of her own. She does not necessarily grow over the course of the story; instead, she functions as a stable centerpiece for the other characters. She loves Keith and Tiffany equally and tries to help them to communicate with each other.

Keith Hunter is Tiffany’s father and is a central secondary character in the novel. While he is not a villain, he does serve as the antagonist for Tiffany’s portions of the novel, as his repressed grief after Claudia’s departure causes him to lash out at Tiffany for her life choices, often harshly. He struggles to acknowledge the genuine criticism that Claudia had of him, refusing to see his own contribution to the estrangement that caused her to leave him. His anger over her departure prevents him from engaging in any form of introspection. Keith is characterized as intense, stubborn, and detached, but he also cares deeply about Tiffany and Granny Ruth in his own way and worries about how he will provide for them financially.

Despite Keith’s internal conflicts, he does not undergo a complete arc in the novel. While he realizes his wrongs to some extent after Tiffany leaves and threatens suicide, the novel does not show the outcome of this conflict, nor does it describe his reunion with his daughter. Much of his growth is therefore left to the imagination. Notably, a parallel between his repressed memories and Pierre’s implies that working through his memories of Claudia will help him to grow and move on, and this subtler aspect of the narrative implies that he may manage to salvage his relationship with his family.

For most of the novel, Tony Banks is Tiffany’s white boyfriend. He occupies an important secondary role and is eventually revealed to be an antagonist when he cheats on Tiffany and expresses his discomfort with the racial tension that their relationship creates in the community. Tony is coded to be antagonistic to Tiffany from the beginning due to his overuse of her status card for his own benefit, but her desire to be accepted compels her to disregard these warning signs and continue to pursue him as a romantic interest. Tony is characterized as cowardly, practical, and condescending; he strongly dislikes criticism and conflict and cares deeply about his appearance and reputation. He is unwilling to break the status quo or take any steps to defend Tiffany or his relationship with her when his friends and father criticize him for dating an Indigenous person.

While Tony is cowardly and caves to the racist pressures of the white community, he is not inherently villainous; instead, the author takes great pains to present him as a very average teenage boy who simply lacks depth or emotional maturity. Tony’s image initially projects a false sense of maturity to characters like Tiffany, since he drives his own car and is popular in school. While his mistakes deeply harm Tiffany and are not excused by the narrative, they are not presented as unique; instead, the narrative implies that his behavior is an unfortunate but anticipatable outcome of the prejudices that have accumulated against Indigenous people. Notably, Tony only seems interested in Tiffany for what she can give him. He only dates her after the weekah root helps his chronic cough, and he then uses her to gain indirect access to her status card and to enjoy physical pleasure, as kisses are their primary method of communication. Ultimately, Tony’s role propels Tiffany’s character arc into a crisis by worsening her overwhelming experience of rejection and isolation.