Ghosh (Narrator)
Ghosh talks about the impending doom that climate change will bring on generations to come if our current generation does not come up with initiatives to counter the effects. Ghosh dispels notions of climate change being used as a propaganda movement by members of the West and urges the reader to consider their own lack of action in the movement.
Adam Sobel
A Columbia professor to whom Ghosh reaches out to get more information about potential cyclonic episodes in the Arabian Sea.
Henry Piddington
A 19th century Englishman in Calcutta who warned the colonial officials in Bengal not to locate the proposed port on the Matla River, as it was subject to storm surges.
John Updike
A novelist whose work Ghosh respects but whose opinions on what makes serious literary fiction are problematic because they do not leave space for something like climate change.
Pope Francis
The author of the LaudatoSi' encyclical, which Ghosh holds up as a model for how we can think about the climate change in a global way.
Dwarkanath Tagore
A "key figure in the history of India's carbon economy" (105), he was a local businessman who "took the initiative in building a commercial infrastructure" (105) and was a promoter of the railways.
Mahatma Gandhi
The Indian activist and moral authority who decried Western industrial capitalism and its "endless" growth.
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
A 19th century Bengali writer and critic whose works reveal what the path of the modern novel was: "sketches of character and pictures of Bengali life" (18) as opposed to the ancient epics and their "mere narrative" (18).
Gustave Flaubert
Author of Madame Bovary, a text that Ghosh uses as an example of the modern novel's structure, style, and concerns.
Mary Shelley
The author of the 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, generally considered the first great novel of science fiction.
