The Book of Sand

Main Characters and Their Development

• The main character, an unnamed narrator, appears as a man immersed in the solitude of his library, where books are his only companions and confidants. His inner world is a labyrinth of reflections, anxieties, and subtle sensations, in which every word and every page becomes a mirror of his own soul. The encounter with the mysterious owner of "The Book of Sand"—a man of Eastern appearance, bearing the enigma of other worlds and times—becomes a fateful turning point after which the narrator’s perception of reality is irreversibly changed. He gradually loses his peace of mind, his thoughts plunging ever deeper into the abyss of infinity and the terror of the incomprehensible embodied by the book without beginning or end. His journey is one from skeptical curiosity to obsession, from rational analysis to mystical fear, from the desire to possess to the realization that the absolute mystery cannot be mastered. The secondary character—the book’s seller, enigmatic and silent, like a shadow from another dimension—serves as a guide between worlds, his presence shrouded in an aura of ancient knowledge and inexpressible longing.