Soldier X

Tamara Imanov is the love interest in the novel. She is the character who lasts the longest throughout the narrative; while most others leave, die, or are left, Tamara stays constant from her entry in Part 2 to the end. Tamara is characterized as the perfect girl at first—she is ethereally pretty despite the effects of war, with long hair and dark eyes. She is additionally described as kind yet resolute in her beliefs and intensely capable at her job as a nurse. She changes as the book goes on, however, as X learns that she is prejudiced due to her experiences with both the Soviets and Nazis, and the struggle for survival in the wilderness damages her health and appearance. This change ensures that Tamara is characterized as human and a victim of the war, not simply an object for X’s affections and needs.

Tamara’s life, like every other character, is heavily affected by loss and grief. Her family is dead or has abandoned her, and she loses everyone she cares about except for X by the novel’s end. Tamara is not given much space within the novel to express this grief; others tell her there is no time for it during the war, and she is told to suppress her feelings for the good of her patients. Although Tamara is bolder than the other nurses, she is still quite emotionally repressed. She does not experience the injury, disfigurement, and brutality of war directly and, as a result, is rarely allowed to suffer as openly as many of the male characters in the novel. Perhaps because of this, deliberately or not, Tamara’s characterization does flatten slightly by the end of the novel. While she is shown to be flawed, by the novel’s end, she serves primarily as a comforting presence for the heavily injured X, and her feelings—other than her love for him—are not explored. Like many of the other nurses, Tamara is often objectified in the text and used as a medium to explore other people’s emotions or experiences rather than her own.

Hals Kessler is a supporting character, serving as a temporary sidekick to X, although he is quickly killed before he can fully develop as a character. He serves as X’s closest friend during the first part of the novel, representing the risk of human connection during war. His death happens offscreen, and his final “action”—slumping over onto X’s shoulder as a corpse—serves as a grisly reminder that affection has no place during war. Hals is less of a character than a symbol, although his cheerfulness and fondness for X is important to shaping X’s experiences in the rest of the book, to the point that X names one of his children after him.

The most important part of Hals’s characterization is the piece of shrapnel he hangs around his neck after X digs it out of his scalp. This shrapnel demonstrates Hals’s understanding of the human condition and of how much a small act can mean between two people during wartime. X didn’t have to help him but chose to, and Hals’s appreciation of that shows his warmth of character, drawing X closer to him as a result.

Nikolai serves as a father figure archetype in the book, helping X recover from his injuries and giving him the strength to go on despite the difficulty of his situation—both real and pretend. Like most of the other characters in the novel, Nikolai is a tragic figure, but unlike them, he does not die; rather, he faces the permanent disability that faced many veterans after World War II. Nikolai is characterized by his hopefulness, kindness, and fatherly love for X, but he also experiences strong grief when his legs are amputated to save his life from gangrene. This altogether makes him a complex figure representing the positive and negative aspects of being a good person during the war. Regardless of how kind and good Nikolai was, he still participated in the war and lost nearly everything to it. The government that cost him his legs offers him nothing but hollow praise for his sacrifice.

Nikolai’s primary characterization comes from his family, even though they are never on the page. His wife and two young sons serve as his motivation and reason to live. This depiction, in turn, helps characterize why people in general fight in war, as like X and others, Nikolai fights to protect and provide for them. Nikolai’s exit from the novel is tearful and abbreviated, and it is unknown if he survives the evacuation from Alreni; regardless, however, his spirit of love and warmth lives on in X’s son, a sculptor and artist.

Jakob is another one of the soldiers whom X befriends in the German army, serving as a symbol of loss of innocence and goodness as well as a temporary sidekick. Jakob starts out cheerful, irrepressible, and intelligent, willing to share facts about the cities they pass without looking up to see the horrific damage done to them by the scorched earth policy of the German army. He ends up a copy of all the other soldiers before his disappearance—grim, afraid, and struggling to survive. This characterization and facelessness continue until the last moment when he might appear—when X shouts at Dobelmann’s platoon far from the front, hoping Jakob is there. Jakob is never directly seen in the crowd, but someone responds to X all the same, representing his loss of identity to the German army—yet it is not a complete loss, as some small part of him survives to respond to his name.

Jakob’s innocence is further explored through his family career—apple sellers. Apples eventually become one of X and Tamara’s primary means of sustenance. While Jakob could have continued his family’s tradition by growing and selling apples, he is instead subsumed into the army, contributing to the war that has wrecked the land. Jakob, like the apple trees of his family farm, ends up destroyed and lost to war, losing his innocence and hope.