70 pages • 2 hours read
James S. A. CoreyLeviathan Wakes
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
James “Jim” Holden
When the story opens, Jim Holden is the executive officer of the Canterbury, a 100-year-old water hauler. He’s been with the Cant for five years and thinks of it as home. Prior to joining the Cant, he was a soldier in the UN Navy. He was discharged for attempting to punch a commanding officer who ordered him to fire on a suspected hostile ship that Holden (correctly) believed was unarmed, which speaks to his uncompromising morality.
Holden is Earthborn. He grew up on a collective farm in Montana, the only child of five fathers and three mothers. He has genes from all of them. He’s well educated, with an aesthetic sensibility and an appreciation for literature—and coffee. He has warm memories of his childhood and likes Montana, but his love of flying has kept him in space for years.
Holden an idealist who believes in transparency. He’s apparently an advocate of the open-source philosophy, although the authors don’t use that term. He thinks the more that information is shared, the better, regardless of missing details or context. His name, “Holden,” suggests his narrative role: He’s the center who holds everyone in orbit. He ensures their safety like the hold in a castle. He’s firm. He stays the course.
Other characters see him as righteous. The text uses “righteous” as a positive attribute, although readers can see that Holden’s not far from being “self-righteous.” He has an intransigence that sometimes borders on naïve and holds him back from carrying out the hero’s quest he’s called to. He doesn’t want to be a leader and only becomes one by necessity after the Canterbury’s demise. Even then, he’s hesitant to involve the Roci and her crew in conflict. Learning to be a leader also requires learning to take risks, including trusting other people. It also requires the ability to view an issue from multiple perspectives. Part of Holden’s arc is learning that things are never black and white—they are always shades of gray. Sometimes he needs to make compromises without knowing if they’ll be justified in the end.
When he finally answers the hero’s call, Holden’s qualities help him develop into an excellent strategist and a courageous warrior who unfailingly puts the welfare of his newfound family above his own. However, he has yet to mature to the point of being willing to sacrifice their welfare for humanity’s greater good—an internal dilemma that resurfaces in later books.
Josephus “Joe” Aloisus Miller
A Belter born and raised on Ceres, Joe Miller is a detective for the security firm Star Helix when the narrative begins. In early chapters, Miller is caught up in a daily grind, merely going through the motions of being a cop. This is reflected in the name “Miller,” which means “one who grinds grain.” It’s also an interesting counterpoint to Holden’s quixotic character: Holden is the idealist tilting at windmills, while Miller is the pragmatist working the mills.
Like Holden, Miller is key to the story’s meditation on The Value of Connection, Family, and Home. Though Miller presents a cynical exterior, he is beset by emotional longing. Divorced and childless, he regrets not having a family. Although he’s lived his entire life on Ceres, he doesn’t have any meaningful connections there. He doesn’t experience anything like family life until he joins the Rocinante crew and is briefly accepted in their circle. This connection breaks down after the raid on Thoth, when Miller kills Dresden in cold blood, which causes a rift between him and Holden. The fact that Miller gives it up this potential family, something he’s wanted for years, to commit an act he knows will damn him shows the intensity of his convictions.
The straw that finally breaks Miller is the realization that others don’t see him as a good cop. His integrity as a detective was the one thing he took pride in, the one thing that gave him confidence. When he realizes how others perceive him, he gives up any pretense of self-respect and finds his reasons for living have dwindled to almost none. The one connection that still beckons to him is his imaginary Julie, who leads him to the real Julie—still alive but in an alien form. Upon finding her, Miller finally accomplishes two things that are important to him: He protects a lot of people, and he gives what remains of himself for love.
Naomi Nagata
Naomi is a Belter and the chief engineer of the Canterbury. Naomi inspires unshakable loyalty in Amos, her assistant, and she is the most intelligent person Jim knows. She’s secretly interested in him romantically, but after seeing him bounce from one casual relationship to another, she doesn’t want to become yet another short-term love interest. Naomi is highly skill and competent at her job. Holden reflects that she can fix anything; when she hints that she’s having trouble completing a task, he knows it’s a negotiating technique to get more staff or resources to aid her work. Eventually, Holden realizes he values Naomi as more than a friend and confesses his feelings, which Naomi initially rebuffs. She resents that he leans so heavily on her for advice rather than owning his responsibilities as captain. She forces him to take on the responsibilities of leadership, helping him grow in to the role in turn.
Amos Burton
A big Earther, Amos serves as mechanic on the Canterbury. He assists Naomi, and at the start of the series, she is the only person he trusts completely. He grew up in Baltimore, where trees haven’t grown in more than a century. There are hints that he has a tough, violent past. Despite this, Amos is usually good humored, though at times he seems like he could explode at any moment. He’s willing to use physical force and isn’t bothered by the consequences of violence. Later books delve into his experiences as a young orphan recruited into a crime gang, which stunted his emotional development and left him with a faulty moral compass. He relies on those he trusts, such as Naomi and later Holden, to determine what is just or unjust, right or wrong.
Alex Kamal
Alex is the Canterbury pilot who accompanies Holden, Naomi, Amos, and Shed on the mission to check the Scopuli. Formerly a pilot in the Martian Navy, Alex is consumed with all the details of flying and totally focused on them despite anything else going on, to the point that he abandoned his family on Mars to pursue his dream of being a pilot. In all other areas, though, Alex is not especially competent. He’s somewhat fearful and less than disciplined when he’s not at the pilot controls.
Juliette “Julie” Andromeda Mao
Julie Mao is locked in a storage locker on the Anubis when the story opens. The Prologue is written from her perspective, and this is the only time readers see her alive—at least in human form. She’s the daughter Julies-Pierre Mao, owner of Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile, which supplies Protogen, the Earth-based corporation conducting secret experiments with the Protomolecule. Miller, Holden, Naomi, Amos, and Alex all discover Julie engulfed by the Protomolecule and evidently dead early in the narrative.
Though born to a powerful Earther family, Julie was not content to live the easy life. She left her family behind and moved to the Belt, where she became an activist with the OPA. She’s a fighter in both the ideological and physical senses, which Miller admires. She’s dedicated to the Belter cause, and in the video Holden and his crew discover while searching the Anubis, she uses her martial arts skills in a fruitless yet determined effort to escape her captors. This demonstrates her strength of conviction, which Miller admires.
Miller falls in love with Julie, although he only knows her indirectly through video footage, photos, notes, and other detritus of her life. She becomes an important figure in his imaginary, internal world, offering Miller sympathy and sometimes insights about mysteries he’s trying to unravel. Of course, she is really a part of his own subconscious—a reflection of who Miller imagines Julie to be, not the girl herself.
Near the end of the book, Miller realizes that Julie is alive in a sense, though the Protomolecule has transformed her into something alien. By the story’s end, all Julie wants is to go home, which causes the Protomolecule-infected Eros to target Earth. Miller convinces her to redirect the Eros’s trajectory to Venus, saving Earth from destruction.
