Although Soren has sexual relationships with several women over the course of the novella, Rachel is the only love interest with whom he shares a meaningful romantic connection, making her central to the novel’s exploration of Human Connection Within the Context of Eternity. The first sentence of the novella foreshadows the relationship: “Although I have loved many, there has been only one genuine love in my near-eternally stretched life—Rachel who fell to the bottom of the library without me” (1). Rachel is not mentioned again until Chapter 3, when she and Soren begin their romance, but this one line primes readers to recognize her importance when she does arrive.

By the end of the story, Soren is searching for Rachel just as much as he is searching for the book that will set him free. He recalls, “I knew finally that Rachel and I would never meet again, but I hoped for a hundred years I would happen upon her one day. I played it out over and over in my mind” (94). This desperate search for her indicates that if Soren were to find Rachel, he might not mind staying in the library for eternity, calling into question the nature of Hell itself. Soren’s description of his time with Rachel does not sound like an account of Hell at all, as he recalls, “A thousand years we traveled the halls of Hell together. I don’t remember fighting. She was magic. Nights were wondrous. Days full of laughter and long, slow conversations” (66-67). The carefree bliss that they experience in each other’s company is more in keeping with stereotypical descriptions of heaven, pointing to love’s association with the promise of redemption in the novella’s imaginative framework. Her lack of character development is central to this role since she never changes in a way that disrupts Soren’s idealization of her.

Biscuit is a secondary character whom Soren meets during his first week in the library. A formerly unhoused veteran of the Vietnam War who struggled with mental health during his lifetime, Biscuit embodies the novella’s central theme of Searching for Meaning in Randomness. When he discovers the phrase “sack it” in a book, he becomes consumed by the irrational conviction that the book has some deeper significance than its random assortment of characters. “Don’t you see?” he asks Soren, “This gives us the number of years we’ll search before finding what we seek. Sack signifies that the thing that has the most meaning to us here, the book with our life story, will be found in ten years” (38). These irrational conclusions make other characters uncomfortable, especially in light of Biscuit’s professed history of mental illness. Dolores’s pointed response, “My heavens, ten years. Here. We’ll all go batty” (38), reveals general anxiety about mental health in the trying environment of the library.

Behind Biscuit’s irrational desire to find meaning in the gibberish lies extreme emotional vulnerability. Upon discovering the “sack it” book, he begins sobbing and then confesses:

I had an old green army laundry bag that I carried everything in […] It was my most prized possession. I carried that sack for twenty-three years, until one day the bottom fell out. I couldn’t let it go even then. I hitchhiked to the Vietnam memorial and placed it on the monument right above a friend’s name (36). 

His obsession with the “sack it” book stems from the traumas of his time without a home and his experiences in the Vietnam War, both of which are experiences that the others cannot fully relate to. Only Elliott, who tells the group that he was a soldier during World War II, can begin to empathize with Biscuit’s particular form of pain. In this way, Biscuit is an inaccessible character for Soren and, by extension, the reader.