Hialmar Ekdal
Hialmar Ekdal is one of the main characters in the play. He is Old Ekdal’s son and after his father was financially ruined, he had to leave his university education, became a photographer, and married Gina Hansen, with whom he has a daughter named Hedvig. While Hialmar is seen by Gregers Werle as a kind of naive and upstanding everyman, he is not necessarily presented in a positive light in the play. He is a photographer, but his wife and daughter work in his place while Hialmar spends his time daydreaming and working with his father in the family's garret. He also never advances his planning or work towards the production of his supposed invention throughout the play. He is aware that he is majorly indebted to Håkon Werle, but he slightly resents his family's downfall and refuses to fill the role of poor or lower-class simpleton that the wealthy seek to force on him (for example, when they want to declaim poetry in Act 1). Nonetheless, Hialmar loves his daughter Hedvig very much, and his tendency to worry and think about the future shows that he is deeply interested in and invested in securing his family’s future. All this is uprooted, however, when Gregers Werle unveils the treachery of his father and casts Hialmar's entire life into doubt. He plans to move out after this revelation, but Hedvig's eventual death reconciles him to Gina.
Gregers Werle
Gregers Werle is Håkon Werle's son, who has been away at the Höidal works for 15 years at the start of the play. He resents his father for what he sees as his betrayal of his mother on her deathbed, and he also resents his father for his shady business practices. He refuses to be integrated into the treachery of his father, and he feels obligated to pursue truth and clarity, no matter the cost. He even feels that truth and transparency should be ends for everyone else as well, and this leads him to insinuate himself among the Ekdals from Act 2 onward. He believes that, by revealing the truth to the Ekdals, he can be like the hunting dog that was able to save the wild duck, but he does not realize that he will do more harm than good in telling the truth. Gregers believes that the truth will help the Ekdal family live more happily, but what he doesn’t realize is that the Ekdal family is happy living a lie. Relling tells him as much in Act 5, and Hedvig's ultimate death is a testament to the emptiness of Gregers' idealism. Finally, the fact that Gregers is referred to throughout the play as ugly presages his ultimate destructive effect on the Ekdal family.
Hedvig Ekdal
Hedvig is Gina’s daughter, and it remains open at the play's end whether her father is Hialmar Ekdal or Håkon Werle. Hedvig is a tragic character, an only child forced to live inside her home and abandon her schooling because of her encroaching blindness. Nonetheless, she is a bright and precocious girl of remarkable emotional intelligence who has the desire to make others happy. Perhaps because she has few friends or because of her parents' busy work, she becomes attached to the wild duck in the family garret. At the play's end, she notices that Hialmar is worried about her paternity, and she is easily manipulated by Gregers into making a sacrifice to prove her love for her father. Gregers' empty pursuit of ideals brainwashes Hedvig into having her grandfather kill the duck, but when he refuses to do so, she takes matters into her own hands. Either by accident or intentionally, Hedvig then dies from a self-inflicted gun wound. In this way, just like Old Ekdal, Hedvig is like the duck, wounded and a prisoner in her own home. For her, ironically, the only way she can truly be free is through death, sinking to the "depths of the sea" that she imagines in the garret.
Old Ekdal
Old Ekdal is Hialmar’s father and a former business partner of Werle’s. After their business suffered because of illegal timber felling, Ekdal was framed by Werle, lost everything, and spent time in prison. When he was released, he began living with his son and with his family, taking up occasional clerical work from Werle's office. Old Ekdal is a shameful man plagued with regret and resentment, but at the same time he is a deeply sympathetic character who is respected by both Hialmar and the audience. A particularly sore point for Old Ekdal is the loss of his military honors, which he protests quietly by wearing his old military uniform around the house. In many ways, Old Ekdal stands in as a metaphorical parallel to the wild duck. He was wounded by Werle, but instead of killing himself (something that many believed he should have done and that he in fact attempted), he decided to live and was forced to live in a kind of financial captivity, constantly regretting the past. Old Ekdal lives in a room of his son’s and, in Hialmar's garret, attempts to reclaim the shattered fragments of his past by taking up hunting, an activity he used to enjoy at the Höidal works. In Ibsen's sympathetic yet critical portrait of Ekdal, many critics also located a compelling portrait of Ibsen's father, Knud.
Håkon Werle
Håkon Werle is Gregers Werle’s father, a former tradesman and business partner of Old Ekdal. He was a ruthless businessman, cold and interested only in financial gain, but over time, he became penitent and started to help the Ekdals recover behind the scenes. His wife, from whom he never received the substantial dowry he was owed, died lonely and bitter, which made Gregers resent him. He used to have a scandalous relationship with Gina, but had her married off to Hialmar to both help Hialmar and tie up his own loose ends. He is essentially estranged from his son, but when it is clear that he is losing his eyesight in old age (not unlike Hedvig), he reconsiders his life and priorities, opting to marry his housekeeper Mrs. Sörby and inviting Gregers back to town to be a more active partner in business and family. His ultimate gift (or perhaps ultimate betrayal) comes in the form of the deed of gift to the Ekdals, which sets Hialmar off on the tirade that will ultimately lead to his daughter's death.
Gina Ekdal
Gina is Hialmar’s wife and Hedvig’s mother. Gina used to work for Håkon Werle, and it is implied that they had a sexual relationship after the death of Gregers' mother, perhaps even leading Werle to be Hedvig's father rather than Hialmar. Gina is an understanding woman, and she lets Hialmar live the way he wants to, even when he resolves to leave their family at the end of the play. She is the one who handles a lot of the family's work—taking pictures, editing them, and keeping books—and she is thus associated throughout the play with the idea of altering reality to hide the truth. At the same time, however, Gina is presented throughout the play as a very crude or uncultured woman, falling into malapropisms and talking in plainer language than either Hialmar or Gregers. In this regard, she also represents the harsh truths of the world that one will go out of their way to cover up.
Mrs. Sörby
Mrs. Sörby is a housekeeper working for the Werles, a woman who ultimately decides to marry Håkon Werle and take care of him in his old age. She is the one who brings Hedvig the deed of gift, and throughout the play she is presented as a very realistic and loyal companion to the elder Werle.
Dr. Relling
Dr. Relling lives downstairs from the Ekdal family and is close with them, taking meals with them and his neighbor, the drunken tutor Molvik. Though Dr. Relling is presented as a kind of degenerate drunk throughout the play, he is nonetheless an intelligent and philosophical character who invents and supplies life illusions for those around him. These illusions, Relling argues, allow people to have a stable vision of their own lives and avoid falling into all kinds of existential despair. He looks at the idealism of Gregers, as well as the character of Gregers (who he knows from the Höidal works), with utter contempt, and he advocates for a far more realistic—if not more deceitful or disingenuous—approach to life. He plays as a kind of stand-in for Ibsen's viewpoint in the play, but this is made especially interesting by the fact that he is an insignificant and disreputable character.
