Narrator
The narrator remains unnamed and unidentified except for a slightly dubious claim to be a professional literary critic. Thanks to a connection with a more successful friend, he gets the opportunity to meet a very famous novelist. A chance conversation then turns into a lifelong obsession that winds up ensuring a lifetime of disappointment.
Hugh Vereker
Vereker is a famous author. Initially, he is dismissive of the narrator, ridiculing a review he’d written of his latest novel. After unwittingly humiliating him in public, he then seeks the narrator out and thus begins a conversation about what the narrator terms “the figure in the carpet” which is a metaphor for the author’s claim that there is a secret key hidden within his work to the meaning that unifies them all.
George Corvick
Corvick is the friend who cannot complete the assignment of writing the review of Vereker’s latest novel due to the latest circumstances involved in his pursuit of his future bride. Since he will not have time to read the novel, he hands off the review writing to the narrator. Later, the narrator will bring Corvick into his obsession to discover Vereker’s secret. After having claimed to have figured it out for himself, Corvick dies in a car accident on his honeymoon without having shared the secret.
Gwendolen Erme
Gwendolyn Erme is a beautiful young novelist who ultimately marries George Corvick. Corvick's final successful tactic in bringing about this union is his supposed assertion to her that he will only reveal Vereker’s secret to his wife. This narrator only learns this information second-hand from Corvick through Gwendolen so it may or may not be true. Nevertheless, once Corvick is dead, his obsession turns to Gwendolen as the most likely source for figuring out “the figure in the carpet.”
Drayton Deane
Gwendolen eventually remarries—another literary critic—Drayton Deane. Upon the subsequent unrelated deaths of Vereker and Gwendolyn, Deane remains the only possible means of learning the secret in the narrator’s mind. Certain that a wife would not hesitate to share an extraordinary secret with her husband, the narrator is convinced that George revealed what he discovered to Gwendolen who passed it onto Drayton who has no reason not to share it with him.
