Scythe

Rowan is the novel’s other protagonist and point-of-view character. He is chosen to apprentice to Scythe Faraday after he shows compassion during a gleaning at his school. He is an empathetic, humorous teen who takes to his training with Faraday naturally and is especially adept at physical combat. However, Scythe Goddard takes over Rowan’s training after Faraday allegedly self-gleans. Rowan quickly finds himself appreciating the scythe’s skill and his unapologetically luxurious lifestyle but knows that Goddard is trying to turn him into someone like him. When Rowan is forced to begin practicing killing live humans, he is disturbed to realize how elating it is and how good he is at it. That even someone as moral as Rowan can take pleasure in violence suggests Human Fallibility and Weakness.

Rowan’s compassion goes hand-in-hand with his selflessness, and he is one of the primary vehicles through which the novel explores The Necessity of Sacrifice. Throughout the book, he is determined to lose the competition and let Citra glean him after she wins. When he participates in a mass gleaning in which Goddard orders the murder all of the people in a monastery, Rowan kills him and his scythes, risking punishment and indulging in the brutality he loathes to stop Goddard from committing further atrocities. In the final gleaning journal of the book, written by Scythe Anastasia (i.e., Citra), it is implied that Rowan has become a vigilante, seeking out and burning scythes who are corrupted and evil.

Scythe Faraday is a stoic, grave man who chooses Rowan and Citra as his apprentices. He is an archetypal mentor: a wise, compassionate teacher who feels the gravity of his duty constantly. He chooses the people he gleans based on statistics regarding causes of death during the Age of Mortality—a dispassionate approach that suggests he strives to be objective and fair in his work.. He lives in a simple house and abides by the 10 laws of the scythes, but he is willing to challenge the system if necessary. For instance, his choice to train two apprentices at once is a novelty, and he is put in a difficult spot when Goddard spearheads the competition between his two students.

Faraday fakes his own self-gleaning to release them from their competition, a selfless act that drives him into hiding for much of the novel. When Citra finds him, he reveals that he has a romantic history with Scythe Curie, her new mentor. The sagacity and austerity of Faraday’s presence are offset by the revelations that he was impetuous and passionate as a young scythe. At the end of the novel, he helps Rowan escape, further underscoring that he is not as beholden to the rules as he might seem.

Scythe Curie is a mentor figure to Citra who is known as the Grand Dame of Death for gleaning the president and his cabinet at the end of the Age of Mortality. She does not enjoy her infamy and tells Citra that she has mixed feelings about the actions that led to it. When Curie takes over Citra’s education, they bond quickly. Though her methods are different than Faraday’s, she too emphasizes the need for empathy in a scythe’s work. Her swift gleanings are always public and always target those who seem to have lost their taste for life, developing the theme of The Value of Mortality. Afterward, she invites the families of the bereaved to her home to celebrate the humanity and life that has been extinguished.

Curie was Faraday’s apprentice as a youth and fell in love with him, although she calls it infatuation. Later, after they were forced to spend several decades apart, they began a true romantic relationship. While this relationship is long over by the narrative present, they remain friends, and it is Curie who helps Faraday fake his own death in order to spare Citra and Rowan the competition. As the novel ends, she is proud of Citra and knows that she will be the change that Scythedom requires in order to progress in the way it was intended.