Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The unnamed Professor, also referred to as Grandfather and old man, is the creator of the shuffling surgery the narrator underwent. He is the “very image of a major pre-War political figure” (26), and all of his dialogue is notably accented, which the narrator calls a “hokey accent” (45). For instance, he says, “I’m a biologist [...] But the word biology doesn’t begin t’cover all that I do. Everythin’ from neurophysiology to acoustics, linguistics to comparative religion” (27). The Professor represents the detective fiction and film noir trope of someone who assigns the protagonist a job that hides a different, unstated task. Initially, the Professor tells the narrator he is laundering and shuffling data to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.

However, the Professor actually had the narrator shuffle a program that created a third consciousness in his mind. The Factory and INKlings destroy the Professor’s equipment and research, making it impossible for him to save the narrator from the third-consciousness program, which he had intended to reverse. The Professor is willing to sacrifice the life of the narrator to avoid giving his technology to the System or Factory. He believes hiding his “technologies to reconfigure the brain” (300) from the people who would exploit them will “save the world” (300). In the end, he escapes the country with the help of his granddaughter and the narrator, and the narrator forgives the Professor.

The first character the narrator interacts with in the novel is the Professor’s 17-year-old granddaughter. She is never given a name—the narrator describes her as the “chubby girl” (72) and repeatedly notes how all of her clothes are pink. Despite sexualizing her body, the narrator refuses her sexual advances and holds the opinion that “[t]he girl was amazing. She was half my age, and she could handle things ten times better than me” (373). The narrator turns out to be correct.

The teenager learned how to climb rope (239), speak “four foreign languages” (178), play “piano and alto sax” (178), and make excellent sandwiches while being homeschooled by her grandfather. She is even able to handle Big Boy and Junior better than the narrator; she shoots Big Boy’s “ear off” (393) when they come back to the narrator’s apartment while she is there and he is not. Throughout the novel, she remains competent and confident, as well as sexually attracted to the narrator. She also plans to put the narrator in a deep freeze with the hopes of reviving him and perhaps finally getting him to sleep with her in the future. This makes her the only character who truly plans for the future and holds on to hope that the narrator will be able to return to his hard-boiled life at some point. Overall, her characterization remains the same—she is a static character.