V for Vendetta

Evey is the main protagonist. She begins the novel as a naïve teen girl who accidentally propositions a Fingerman for sex to make extra money. When the man tries to rape her, V saves her and takes her in as his protégée. Evey initially sees V as a storybook hero and wants to help him with his mission. However, she grows disillusioned when he involves her in the Bishop’s assassination plot without telling her the Bishop would be killed. Though Evey is an adept and perceptive student, she has remnants of naivety and unhealed traumas over her mother’s death and father’s kidnapping by Norsefire. This leads V to desert her. She seeks refuge with Gordon Dietrich, a gangster and a much older man who she sometimes conflates with her father, even though the two have a sexual relationship.

The most drastic change in Evey’s character occurs after Gordon’s murder, when V kidnaps her, imprisons her, and tortures her in the guise of the Norsefire government. In V’s prison, she is radicalized by Valerie’s letter, just like V was in Larkhill. Though furious at V for his actions, she ultimately escapes the societal prison Norsefire has made for her and is reborn under the tenets of anarchy.

After V’s death, Evey adopts his disguise and becomes the new V. V tells Evey that anarchy needs destroyers and builders; V is the destroyer, and Evey is the builder. While Norsefire kills in genocidal numbers to maintain their power and V kills in great numbers to topple Norsefire, Evey vows the opposite: “I’ll help them create where I’ll not help them kill. The age of killers is no more” (260). She is ready to help usher Britain toward a new future, where they will begin to heal the harms of the past.

Finch is a key side character. He begins the novel as a dedicated detective who excels in his role as head of the Nose, Norsefire’s investigative department. Though he is employed by Norsefire, he is not an antagonist. He regularly tells the Leader that he doesn’t like Norsefire’s “New Order,” and his allegiance is to the British public.

Finch believes that the only way to capture V is to get inside his mind. As he does this, he begins to adopt V’s ideologies. He becomes disillusioned with Norsefire after reading Delia’s diaries; Finch realizes that the person who he saw as a “good woman” was able to commit unspeakable acts of medical torture at Norsefire’s direction.

His transformation is complete when he follows V’s path through Larkhill and sees the extent of Norsefire’s brutal genocide. When he visits the ruins of V’s former room, he has a breakthrough like the one V forced upon Evey. He asks, “Who’s controlling and constraining my life, except…me? I…am free” (215). He realizes that he was allowing himself to be imprisoned, and likewise, he can free himself.

Though Finch kills V, he ends the novel living by the principles V introduced to the country. He quits his job at the Nose and turns down Helen’s offer to create a new order together, deciding instead to face the great unknown alone.

As the dictator behind Norsefire, the Leader is responsible for his government’s genocide against people of diverse races, sexualities, and ideologies. He is proud of being a fascist and believes that he is doing the citizens a favor. By 1997, the Leader spends his days alone with the Fate computer, which he treats as a lover and addresses as a woman. He believes that Fate is God and relies entirely on Fate for power, positioning Fate as the cornerstone of his government. This calls to mind the long-standing European ideology of “the divine right of kings,” in which kings derive their power and authority straight from God. As such, they cannot be held accountable by earthly forces, even if they commit unjust actions.

The Leader mistakenly believes this to be true about himself. When he makes an appearance to the British public to raise morale, his men allow Rosemary to approach his car because their interaction will “look good.” It is then that Rosemary shoots and kills him.

Derek Almond leads the Finger in the novel’s first volume. He has a strained relationship with his fellow government employees. As a result, Dascombe, who works for the Mouth, calls him “Bitter Almond.” At one point, Almond tells Dascombe: “A lot of you media people are ‘sensitive,’ aren’t you? I don’t know why the Leader tolerates you” (17)—this is perhaps a veiled comment on their sexualities, as well as a threat, since Norsefire infamously imprisons gay people.

Though most men working for Norsefire are cruel and ruthless, Almond is particularly violent. He verbally and physically abuses his wife, Rosemary, at one point pulling the trigger of an unloaded gun in her face. Ironically, this demonstration of violence leads to his death when he forgets to reload the gun before confronting V.

Rosemary is Almond’s wife. Though she tries to discuss their marital problems, Almond verbally, physically, and emotionally abuses her. Despite this, she feels lost and alone after his death. Single women have very few paths to safety or prosperity under Norsefire’s reign. Soon after Almond’s death, Rosemary begins an affair with Dascombe, then later becomes a cabaret dancer at the Kitty Kat Keller, where she “crouch[es] like an animal and offer[s] [her] hindquarters in submission to the world” (205). She prefers this to being alone in the world.

Rosemary buys a gun from gangster Alastair Harper. At the end of the novel, she uses the gun to kill the Leader, whom she blames for the death of her husband, the loss of her pension, her forced humiliation and subjugation, and the state of their country. Though she is not in league with V and Evey, Rosemary’s actions contribute to their cause.

Lewis Prothero works for the Mouth as the Voice of Fate. Though Prothero reads Fate’s broadcasts to the citizens, they believe his voice is that of the computer. This poses a problem when V kidnaps Prothero. According to the Leader, the public’s “belief in the integrity of Fate is the cornerstone” of the Norsefire government (30); they cannot replace Prothero lest the fiction of the computer be exposed. Norsefire’s conundrum after Prothero’s kidnapping reveals that while the Interconnected Tools of Fascism seem firm and absolute, they are actually fragile.

Prothero is a blustery and entitled man. His most prized possession is his large doll collection. In 1993, as a commander at Larkhill, he hand-chose prisoners for Delia to use in her experiments. When V kidnaps him in 1997, he steals Prothero’s dolls and stages them as prisoners in a replica of Larkhill that he built in the Shadow Gallery. Witnessing the destruction of his dolls makes Prothero despondent; V returns “what’s left of him” (36) to Norsefire.

The Bishop is an antagonist and one of V’s final three victims. While working at Larkhill, the Bishop inserted himself into Delia’s experimentations, claiming to provide spiritual guidance to the victims. In 1997, he oversees a congregation in London and delivers sermons that tie together the tenets of Christianity, fascism, and white supremacy. Key themes of his sermons are decided by the Fate supercomputer, which the Bishop conflates with “the Almighty” (46). In this way, the Bishop is a key figure in the government’s attempts to naturalize their fascist regime and integrate it into every aspect of civilian life.

After his sermons, the Bishop hosts underage girls from an “agency” in his chambers—the men working at the Ear call this “children’s hour.” The Bishop has a sexual interest in these girls, and it is heavily implied that he abuses and rapes them. Evey pretends to be from the agency so that V can enter the Bishop’s rooms and kill him with a poisoned Host.

Dr. Delia Surridge is a medical doctor who was formerly employed at Larkhill. In 1997, she works as an autopsy surgeon. She is the last of V’s final three victims and the most sympathetic to both V and the reader. While at Larkhill, she administered brutal hormone research experiments to human subjects, particularly V. Though she enjoyed this at the time, she experienced profound regret in the years since and has been waiting for V to kill her. When he finally comes for her, she is thankful. The two have an almost tender exchange, and V’s method of killing her is quiet and peaceful. He administers poison to her in her sleep, in a reversal of her own experiments. Her last request is to see his real face, which he obliges.

Whether Delia is an antagonist is purposefully ambiguous. Unlike Prothero and the Bishop, she seems kind and sympathetic. Regardless, she willingly committed inhumane and torturous acts under the guise of science. Her character arc inspires questions about how and why seemingly good people can be convinced to do terrible things, as well as the responsibility of individuals when standing up to or complying with the larger system they are part of.

Conrad Heyer leads the Eye, Norsefire’s visual surveillance. He is not particularly cruel, nor is he kind; he is passive and weak-willed. His wife Helen says he spends his free time “watching what the neighbors do after Sunday lunch” (46). She berates his profession to their friends, calling him “a professional Peeping Tom” and “England’s highest paid voyeur” (46). Though Conrad is a minor side character through most of the graphic novel, he plays a larger role in Book 3, when his wife Helen plans to instate him as the puppet dictator of London. Conrad’s lack of character enables Helen to use him for her plans. In one of the novel’s many ironic deaths, when Helen finds him bleeding out, she trains a camera on him so he can watch himself die.