Like the narrator, the girl is never named. Her identity is constructed from biographical fragments that the narrator has obtained through bribes and his own first impressions. From his perspective, she is a 16-year-old orphan whom he regards as a “delicate creature” (61). He found her meekness and frailty striking when they first met. However, when she visited his pawnshop, she did so in an attempt to assert control over her life. She was a person with agency, not a passive figure who easily accepted her position in life. She pawned objects to pay for classified ads in the hope of finding a job, and she wanted a job so that her overbearing aunts would not force her to marry a shopkeeper who was even older than the narrator. The young girl was in a precarious position. Without parents, her aunts wanted to essentially sell her to the highest bidder, while her failed advertisements speak to the hostility of the world she inhabited. She had no one to help her, and, eventually, she was given a choice between marrying an old shopkeeper or marrying an old pawnbroker. Since she was just a teenager, the extent to which she can even be considered to have had a choice is dubious. She was coerced into marriage in such a way that speaks to the precarity of her situation. Through her character’s struggles, the story illustrates The Oppression Of Women Within Patriarchal Marriage. The narrator, fully enveloped in his subjectivity, never appreciates this precarity. 

When the girl hesitated to accept his proposal, the narrator raged against the “pulse pounding away” in his head (70). The reader only knows what he saw and felt, not what was happening in her head. To the narrator, the girl was not a person; she was a method of alleviating his alienation and loneliness. However, rather than improving his situation, he only succeeded in dragging the girl deeper into his misery. Her emotional isolation intensified, leading to a series of health problems that function as physical manifestations of emotional pain. She felt increasingly trapped in the claustrophobic marriage, in which her new husband policed her behavior and refused to see her as anything more than a gentle creature that existed to improve his own mood. After he reclaimed her from Yefimovich, she stood above him with his revolver against his temple. She was responding to the miserable situation in which he had trapped her, but her exact motivations are obscured in the narrator’s telling. Due to the subjective nature of the narration and the narrator’s own flaws and biases, the narrative is unable to humanize her. Her inscrutability becomes her defining feature. 

This is evident in her final act. Deprived of hope, she took her life. The narrator cannot understand her decision, but he never understood her as a person. He does not try to interpret her holding the icon or her last words. Such matters are left vague and uninterpreted because, in death, she remains as elusive as in life, at least from the perspective of the narrator. He repurposes the story of her suicide into a story about himself, speaking to the way in which his subjective narration limits his understanding of other humans. The girl is a primary victim of his ignorance. Even in death, she is denied the agency and humanity of a person with her own desires, emotions, and motivations.

In a story with few named characters, Lukeriya is a notable presence. She is a servant and a representative of a different social class. Her interactions with the narrator provide insight into the way in which social class functioned in Russian society during this era, as well as how the narrator differs from most people. After the girl agreed to marry the narrator, Lukeriya accepted a job in the household of the newly married couple. This was not solely an economic decision. She feels a sense of loyalty to the girl, telling the narrator that she will be “leaving” as soon as the girl is buried. She does not need the job or feel any loyalty to her mourning employer. She shows more genuine attachment and empathy toward the girl than the narrator ever does and emerges as a sincere, caring person. Her class position does not make her immune to empathy, even toward her employers. It is not social class, then, that limits the extent of the narrator’s empathy. He simply does not empathize with others. Lukeriya recognizes this and has no interest in remaining in his employ. 

Lukeriya is also significant because, other than the narrator, she is the only person who exerts any influence over the telling of the story. Since he was away during his wife’s suicide, the narrator relies on Lukeriya to explain the last moments of his wife’s existence. This is one of the most significant moments in the story and the point that bridges its past and present tenses. The narrator’s absence speaks to his broader sense of absence from society itself. In Lukeriya’s telling, the girl smiled and responded positively to conversation in a way that she never did with the narrator. From Lukeriya’s very brief recounting, the audience is able to realize that the narrator’s perspective may not be reliable. Lukeriya’s presence emphasizes that the narrator is a marginalized figure who is unable to relate to anyone around him. He is even unable to see how Lukeriya’s account reflects so badly on him.