48 pages • 1 hour read
Susanna ClarkePiranesi
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A 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
Piranesi/The Beloved Child of the House/Matthew Rose Sorensen
The first-person narrator, the write of the journal that makes up this epistolary novel, takes on three identities. All are a bespectacled, slender, young man in his mid-thirties. While in the labyrinth, the narrator does experience some slight physical changes from strenuous fishing, walking, and other activities, but most of the differences between the personas are psychological.
The Beloved Child of the House is what the narrator calls himself, identifying as a “scientist and an explorer” (6) who is extremely knowledgeable about the House. Slowly he realizes he is an unreliable narrator because he “had forgotten many things!” (108). He is a solitary and pragmatic identity created after the narrator lost the memories associated with being Matthew Rose Sorensen.
Piranesi is what Ketterley calls the narrator, but even in his most disassociated state, he does not “think that it is [his] name” (134). Ketterley references the Italian artist of the Carceri d’invenzione, saying, “I have to call you something. And it suits you. It’s a name associated with labyrinths” (163). Piranesi is also “a romantic” (143), according to Ketterley. Most importantly, the name Piranesi hides Ketterley’s abduction of the narrator; it aids in keeping the Sorensen identity mentally imprisoned.
The writer and journalist Matthew Rose Sorensen is never fully recovered; the labyrinth essentially killed this identity. The narrator says at one point that Sorensen “lives inside me, that he is unconscious but perfectly safe, and that I am a strong and resourceful person who will care for him assiduously, exactly as I care for any other of the Dead” (217). Most of the details the narrator gleans about Sorensen come from his writing.
Trauma is what caused the triple-splintering of identity. Even when he isn’t aware he is a prisoner, the narrator exhibits trauma responses. He thinks, “But I, who am not Piranesi—or at least not only him” (238). Trauma also affects how he interacts with other people after being isolated; he thinks: “Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not” (228) when Raphael voices a differing opinion about the dead.
Valentine Ketterley/The Other
Valentine Ketterley imprisoned the narrator in the labyrinth, but it takes most of the novel for Piranesi to discover this fact. Initially, Piranesi believes the Other (as he calls Ketterley) is his only friend. Ketterley uses a “shining device” (24) instead of notebooks and pens like the narrator and wears a variety of “well-cut suit[s]” (21) that Matthew Rose Sorensen/Piranesi envies. Ketterley’s fear of the tides and his inability to “revere the House” (47) like the narrator foreshadow his eventual death in the flood.
Ketterley is initially considered a “friendly but slightly austere person devoted to the life of the intellect” (8) and a scientist by Piranesi. He turns out to be a psychologist and former student of Arne-Sayles who is trying to obtain magical power from the labyrinth by any means necessary. Ketterley’s focus shifts from occult practices to tracking down and killing 16, the police officer investigating him.
Ketterley’s name is an allusion to a character in The Magician’s Nephew, the first book in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia Series, who (like the Ketterley of this novel) is able to open a portal between two worlds.
The Sixteenth Person/Sarah Raphael
Piranesi believes there are 15 people in the labyrinth (which he believes is the entire world), all of them dead except Ketterley and himself. Initial speculations about sixteenth person turn from an abstract notion that someone else may be reading his journals to Ketterley’s enemy. Ketterley lies, saying 16 is “hostile to Reason, Science and Happiness” (77) and “fundamentally untrustworthy” (143). However, 16 is in fact a police officer named Sarah Raphael who is investigating the disappearance of Matthew Rose Sorensen.
The narrator describes her as having an elfin face and being about forty years old. Raphael helps the narrator realize that he is a prisoner, but is conscientious of his trauma and lets him return to London in his own time. Despite being trapped in a high statue during the flood while being shot at by Ketterley, she ends up liking the labyrinth and willingly returns before and after the narrator is rescued. This is probably due to the fact that her colleagues, like Jamie Askill, think she’s “not the easiest person in the world to work with” (236) despite her amazing record of negotiations.
The Prophet/Laurence Arne-Sayles
When an old man visits the labyrinth and reveals information about it, the narrator dubs him “The Prophet.” In fact, this old man is the professor who discovered the labyrinth and is responsible for a variety of labyrinth-related deaths that landed him in prison for a period of time. Arne-Sayles is a gay author who is “revered” by some as “an extraordinary genius and a sort of pagan saint” (150). Ketterley considers him personally manipulative but intellectually honest (176). Featuring heavily in the narrator’s journals, Arne-Sayles is interesting to Matthew Rose Sorensen as a book subject because he “is the transgressive thinker par excellence” (175). In her investigation, Raphael manages to get Arne-Sayles to reveal the method for entering the labyrinth. Arne-Sayles is not seen again after his conversation with the narrator, but the narrator decides to write the book about Arne-Sayles that Sorensen planned in the end.
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