Colonel Dragases is an anti-heroic figure who embodies a form of militant, traditionalist resistance to the West’s collapse. He is one of the few characters who acts with decisive certainty. Initially presented as a dutiful officer overseeing the grim task of burning migrant corpses, he is a man whose suffering is “devoid of pity” (57), reflecting a pragmatic and unsentimental worldview. His name alludes to Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos, the last emperor of Byzantium, which positions him as a defender of a dying civilization. Unlike the immobilized political leaders, Dragases understands the novel’s conflict in existential terms, believing that in the “strange war that [i]s coming, victory w[ill] go to those who love[] themselves most” (58). As the state’s authority dissolves, Dragases’s role becomes more symbolic. Appointed commander-in-chief by the president, he gathers the remnants of the army for a last stand. His final actions are theatrical and self-aware; he leads his small band of resisters not with any hope of victory but to ensure a “fitting conclusion”—death via violence rather than capitulation. Dragases considers both the migrants and the white people he deems collaborators, like Panama Ranger’s militia, with the same racist and nationalist hatred. He fights both with the same conviction, viewing them as enemies of his world. His retreat to the Village and the establishment of a micro-government are a performance of Western identity in its final moments.

The president of the French Republic serves as the central symbol of the Western political establishment’s stagnation and moral ambivalence. He is defined by the conflict between his private understanding of the threat and his public inability to act. In cabinet meetings, he shows a cynical awareness of the situation, privately admitting the need for a “stimulating path of refusal” and recognizing the hollowness of his ministers’ rhetoric (107). However, he is trapped by the dominant humanitarian ideology and the fear of being publicly condemned by “world opinion and the universal conscience” (231). His character arc culminates in his midnight address to the nation on Easter Sunday. He begins by reading a prepared speech that authorizes the use of military force—a final, decisive act to defend the nation. In a moment of high drama, he breaks from the text. Overcome with guilt and pity for the migrants, he improvises, declaring that “[k]illing is difficult” and absolving every soldier of their duty to obey orders (254). This decision to place the burden of resistance on individual conscience effectively dissolves the authority of the state and guarantees the nation’s collapse. His failure of will is portrayed as the fatal moment for the West, a capitulation born not of compassion but of an inability to bear the moral weight of self-preservation.

Professor Calguès is an archetypal guardian of culture who represents the intellectual and historical tradition of the West. He lives in a house built by a direct ancestor in 1673, embodying a deep-rooted connection to French history and civilization. Unlike other characters who react with panic to the fleet, Calguès observes the arrival with the detached interest of a scholar: He uses his telescope to study the migrants as a “scientist looking at his cultured medium through a microscope” (52). This recapitulates the novel’s insistence on massing the migrants into a biological contagion in a bid to perform Dehumanization as a Tool of Racist Ideology rather than describing them as people.

Calguès’s worldview is that of a man secure in his belonging. However, when a young nihilist arrives on his terrace proclaiming the end of the West, Calguès engages him in a brief philosophical debate before calmly executing him with a shotgun, showing Nationalism as Constructed Rather Than Inherited—unable to sway the man with words, Calguès enacts his version of protecting his heritage in its “last moments.” After the fleet lands, Calguès chooses to remain in his home, surrounded by the objects, books, and traditions that constitute his identity, preparing a final meal and awaiting the end with a sense of peace. His last stand is a conscious decision to die with what he sees as dignity, though he also embraces the murderous culture of the Village that forms around him.

Clément Dio is a prominent journalist and intellectual who functions as a key antagonist, representing the self-hating segment of the Western elite that actively facilitates the civilization’s demise. The novel refuses to allow him the intellectual or political agency of its protagonists. Instead, in a move highlighting Racist Anxieties in the Postcolonial World, it declares that his motivations are rooted in a personal history of racial grievance, stemming from the discovery that his grandmother was a Black woman enslaved by French officers. This fuels a deep-seated desire for vengeance against the West. As a powerful media figure, Dio shapes public opinion, coining the influential term “The Last Chance Armada” and framing the migration as a moral imperative (116). He is a master manipulator of language, using humanitarian rhetoric to advance the destructive agenda that the novel portrays as a global liberal-humanitarian conspiracy. Dio is not a naive idealist; he is fully aware of the consequences of his actions and embraces them with a nihilistic glee, viewing the collapse as deserved.

Jules Machefer, the editor-in-chief of the small newspaper La Pensée nationale, serves as the novel’s archetypal dissenting voice: a prophet articulating the politically unpopular reality of the situation. His primary role is to provide the counter-narrative that the novel endorses to the dominant humanitarian consensus. Machefer openly refers to the fleet as an “invasion” and argues for armed resistance, a position that makes him an outcast among the mainstream press. His newspaper is a marginal operation, surviving on anonymous donations, which symbolizes the suppressed and underfunded nature of his perspective, aligning with far-right conspiratorial thinking about being silenced. He recognizes the power of the media to shape reality and chooses a strategy of self-censorship, publishing only a map tracking the fleet’s progress under the headline “Just x kilometers until the truth!” (136). He believes that only a direct confrontation with reality, not rhetoric, can awaken the public. Machefer represents a form of pragmatic nationalism; his decision to join Colonel Dragases’s last stand in the Village is the logical conclusion of his convictions, choosing direct action when words have failed.

The unnamed Dalit man who leads the fleet is labeled with the slur “coprophage” (or feces eater) throughout the novel because of his work handling waste. His unnamed young son, who becomes the fleet’s symbolic figurehead, has several disabilities and physical differences; the novel aggressively cultivates reader disgust rather than sympathy by calling him exclusively with the vilifying term “monster-child.” In another work, the father’s devotion to his son and his care for the boy would be portrayed as a moving moral ideal. Here, they are instead figured as a grotesque symbol of the migrants in the novel’s most extreme use of Dehumanization as a Tool of Racist Ideology.

The man, a “dung-roller” from the lowest caste of Indian society, rises to become a messianic demagogue, articulating the myth of a promised Western paradise that galvanizes the multitude. His power is legitimized by the son he carries on his shoulders like a “dreadful totem.” The child is non-verbal and nearly immobile, but his spasms and gaze are interpreted by the crowd as divine pronouncements. Together, they represent a subversion of traditional leadership. Their leadership is instinctual and mystical, reinforcing the portrayal of the migrants as an irrational, elemental force rather than a group of people with a political or social perspective. The image of the child wearing the captain’s cap and steering the fleet is meant to instill horror and revulsion in readers.

The apostolic prefect of the Ganges, an unnamed Catholic bishop, symbolizes the corruption of Christian charity into a self-destructive and perverse ideology. Initially one of the Westerners who facilitate the migration out of a sense of misguided compassion, his journey with the armada becomes a descent into total degradation. Onboard the Calcutta Star, the bishop “goes native” (14), abandoning his faith and identity to succumb to the vegetative, hyper-sexualized life of the migrants. He becomes a holy fool, participating in public sexual rituals and forgetting his past. His physical and spiritual decay mirrors the West’s own decline. He is ultimately abandoned by the migrants and left to die on the sinking, empty ship after it runs aground. His final moments of lucidity are a pathetic recognition of his folly. As a character, he represents the novel’s belief that the modern Church’s attempt to embrace a universalist humanitarianism betrays its own flock.

Jean Perret is an undersecretary who functions as a cynical but clear-eyed political realist. Earning the narrator’s approval, he is one of the few members of the government who understands the crisis without illusion. From the outset, he mocks his colleagues’ ineptitude, sarcastically proposing that they create an “Itinerant Republic of the Ocean Seas” to deal with the fleet (104). His clear-headedness and lack of moral pretense earn him the trust of the president, who appoints him as his personal representative and “gauleiter of the south” (213)—the novel’s open admission of its far-right political orientation since gauleiters were district governors under Nazism. Perret is a pragmatist who recognizes the failure of the state and the decay of its institutions, including the army. He is the intellectual counterpart to Colonel Dragases’s military traditionalism. Perret’s decision to join the last stand in the Village is a rational choice to align himself with the only remaining force of what the novel considers order, however symbolic. He embraces the theatricality of their final days, playing his part as a minister in their micro-government with sardonic humor.

Captain Notaras, the Greek commander of the cargo ship Isle of Naxos, represents an atavistic, brutal form of Western self-defense. When he encounters shipwrecked migrant survivors, he gives the order to sail through them at full speed, murdering a thousand people. This sadistic mass killing is presented in the novel as a principled act of war. Notaras’s name connects him to a Byzantine ancestor who fought and died resisting the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, framing his crime within a historical context of civilizational defense. While the Western world universally condemns him as a racist monster and he is imprisoned for his actions, the narrative positions him as one of the few white people willing to use violence to repel the perceived threat that the novel makes the migrants out to be. He becomes a symbol of the ruthlessness that the modern West has lost and that the novel hopes to promote. After escaping from prison, Notaras joins Colonel Dragases’s last stand in the Village, where his infamous reputation is ironically welcomed. He is an anti-heroic, extreme figure who highlights the moral stagnation of a civilization that can neither defend itself nor accept the brutal logic of survival.

The unnamed young man who confronts Professor Calguès on his terrace is a foil to the old professor and a symbol of what the novel diagnoses as nihilistic self-loathing within Western youth. To articulate this internal decay, the youth expresses joy at the armada’s arrival, celebrating the impending destruction of his own culture. He wishes to dissolve his identity, to have a “dark child” so that he will “no longer see [him]self in anyone” (59). His hatred is directed at the symbols of Western heritage, embodied by Calguès and his ancestral home, which the young man vows to see destroyed by the migrants. The novel, espousing Racist Anxieties in the Postcolonial World, argues that the younger generation has internalized the critique of the West to the point of desiring its annihilation. The young man’s death at the hands of Calguès is a symbolic confrontation where the old world, in its final moments, eliminates the sickness that has festered within it.

Panama Ranger is the charismatic leader of a group of revolutionary youths who see the migrant invasion as an opportunity to overthrow the existing social order. He and his followers represent the internal forces of anarchy that actively assist in the collapse of the state. They are not ideologically aligned with the migrants but are allied with them in their desire for destruction. Panama Ranger, who gets his name from his ironic wearing of a surplus US Army jacket with a Rangers badge on the sleeve, is portrayed as a “handsome young god” whose motivation is a nihilistic quest for action and enjoyment (220). His group engages in looting, attacks the army, and liberates prisons, accelerating the breakdown of law and order. When he finally comes face to face with the migrants he has helped, he is horrified by their smell; he and his group are simply absorbed and swept aside by the indifferent crowd. For the gleeful narrator, Ranger’s ending illustrates the naive folly of the Western radicals who believe they can control or ally with the elemental force of migration, only to be rendered irrelevant by it.

Albert Durfort and Boris Vilsberg are influential radio commentators who represent the two dominant modes of thought in Western media that the novel blames for contributing to the civilization’s immobilization. Durfort is a sentimental humanitarian, a “Zorro of the microphone” who frames every issue in terms of compassion and social justice (118). He portrays the migrants as victims and urges the West to embrace them out of a sense of guilt. Vilsberg is a subtle intellectual who deconstructs Western values through systematic doubt. He raises alarms about the threat to the “white race” only to pivot to a call for acceptance and coexistence, turning the crisis into an “antiracism game” (134). Together, these two figures, one appealing to the heart and the other to a corrupted intellect, create a brainwashed public incapable of seeing the migration as a threat. They are key servants of what the narrative calls “the beast”—the novel’s term for the liberal forces creating a cultural climate in which resistance morally unthinkable.

Himmans is a minor but significant character in Calcutta who represents an early, isolated, and ultimately futile instance of Western resistance. Faced with a growing crowd of would-be migrants demanding to be adopted and sent to Europe, he attempts to enforce his government’s policy of closing the border. His efforts are met with the unstoppable force of the burgeoning myth of the Western paradise. In a final, desperate act, he marches to the docks with a single Sikh guard to try and prevent the crowd from boarding the ships. His gesture is a “ridiculous expedition,” a parody of past colonial power. He fires a single shot before being trampled to death by the mob. His lonely death on the banks of the Ganges is a microcosm of what the novel prophesies as the West’s larger fate: a solitary, unsupported act of defiance quickly overwhelmed. The narrator’s juxtaposition of this named individual with the undifferentiated mass of migrants exemplifies how the novel constructs “West” and “East” as Manufactured Identities.

Dom Melchior de Groix, the elderly abbot of Fontgembar, and Dom Paul Pinet, his younger prior, represent the schism within the traditional Catholic Church. Dom Melchior, a man who admits he “never had any” faith (286), decides to lead his aging monks in a final, theatrical procession to the sea, carrying the Holy Sacrament to miraculously repel the invaders. His act is one of pure, aesthetic traditionalism, a gesture for the sake of form and a beautiful death. Dom Pinet represents the modern, rationalized cleric who sees this as “[m]adness, pride, and senility” (282). He tries to stop the procession, believing in dialogue and accommodation. His attempt to join Panama Ranger’s group ends in his death, a victim of the very chaos he failed to oppose. The other monks are ultimately trampled by the migrant crowd, their faith and their gestures equally meaningless to the invaders. Their story dramatizes the novel’s insistence on the impotence of a divided and dying faith.