K. J. Boone is the primary antagonist of the novel. The central narrative conflict hinges on his stubborn refusal to admit that his work in the oil industry has caused irreparable damage to the environment. Though Jill feels a duty to comfort Boone in the hour of his death, the Frenchman urges Jill to withhold comfort in favor of judgment: “I advise you to lead him, as quickly as possible, to contrition, shame, and self-loathing” (13). This quandary drives the novel’s thematic focus on The Tension Between Compassion and Justice, exploring whether all people deserve comfort before death, regardless of the choices and moral values they espoused in life.

Boone’s backstory informs his reluctance to concede the Frenchman’s moral superiority. Boone was raised in a family of modest means but grew up admiring the rich and powerful people who lived around him, such as the men at the country club where Boone worked. Boone’s physically short stature reinforces his desire to prove his worth and achieve success. Through grit and industry, Boone works his way up the career ladder to the helm of a major oil company, which Boone claims fulfills the American Dream. The Frenchman’s message of repentance contradicts Boone’s perception of his life’s purpose, which underscores Jill’s philosophy that people have certain predispositions that limit their choices, making any form of judgment untenable for elevated beings.

The novel exposes Boone’s self-delusion through his attempts to misrepresent himself as a person who lived above moral reproach. For example, when he revisits the memories of his childhood, he imagines his classmates organizing a false vote absolving him of his alleged crimes. When presenting his case to his childhood schoolteacher, Miss Eva, however, the adult conscience of Miss Eva speaks against him, representing Boone’s self-awareness of his own guilt despite his attempts to deny it. Although he champions himself as a self-made man who made something worthwhile of his life, his conscience creeps through and exposes the repressed guilt he feels about his impact on the environment. This defensiveness often exposes moments from his life when the worst aspects of his character won out, such as when he mocked Ed Dell for regretting his role in the Aarhus speech or when he refused to meet the Chicago college student’s challenge to recant his position on climate change. In other cases, like when Boone’s daughter Julia expresses doubt over his integrity, Boone’s conscience relents for fear that someone he loves and whose opinion he values may be right about his character.

The conflict is ultimately resolved when Jill gives Boone a chance to redeem himself in the afterlife. Rather than perpetuating his antagonism with the Frenchman, Boone commits himself to joining forces with his former spiritual enemy, so that they can both seek peace for their contribution to the degradation of the world they once inhabited.

The Frenchman is a supporting character who functions as a foil for Boone. Initially, his presence poses an obstacle to Jill’s mission at Boone’s deathbed. He urges her not to give Boone comfort, but to make him repent for the choices he made in life, introducing the possibility that some humans, like Boone, are undeserving of comfort in the last moments of their lives.

Saunders obscures The Frenchman’s identity, never revealing his human name. The only concrete detail supplied from his backstory is that The Frenchman was instrumental in the invention of the world’s first engine, which brought him and his family prominence and wealth. In the afterlife, the Frenchman spends his time visiting people, like Boone, who have continued his legacy and interviewing them to see if they are capable of repentance and willing to reverse the course of the damage their work has done to the environment before it is too late. The absence of a clear identity for the Frenchman allows him to function as a representation for the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution, who, while celebrated in their time, developed technologies that led to climate change and global warming, foregrounding The Environmental Cost of Industrial Development. Saunders positions Boone, who represents the ideals of the American Dream and exposes the individualist flaws inherent to it, as a natural consequence of those, like the Frenchman, who came before him.

Unlike Jill, the Frenchman is not elevated, which is why he’s capable of regularly passing judgment over other souls, introducing the novel’s thematic interest in The Role of Human Nature in Moral Conversion. Where Jill’s mission is compelled by her insight into the nature of the human condition, the Frenchman’s mission is compelled by a call for repentance, but his human morality prevents him from directly acting on souls as Jill does. He can only influence them to make choices.

The Mels are secondary antagonists who recur throughout the narrative, embodying an extreme version of Boone’s philosophy and providing an image of the form his damnation could take if he chooses not to acknowledge the environmental consequences of his actions and repent for them. Mel R. and Mel G. are former colleagues of Boone’s who contributed to the development of the atomic bomb in World War II. They constantly try to frame their actions as instrumental to victory and the achievement of global peace while omitting the fact that their invention directly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people when the atomic bomb was detonated by the United States over Japan.

Saunders depicts The Mels as souls with manic personalities, eager to claim the soul of Boone for themselves, so that they have someone to reminisce about the past with them. The novel frames this fate as the opposite of elevation, defined as a radical detachment from the self and the past. Saunders also implies that the Mels experience an existential loneliness that they can only quell through the company of like-minded souls like Boone. For his part, Boone is reluctant to join the Mels, which signals the possibility of his moral conversion. The Mels are eventually defeated when Jill uses her part-elevated, part-human nature to liberate Boone from their captivity, even as she acknowledges that they, too, are “inevitable occurrences,” and that their predispositions limited their ability to choose to live differently.

Julia, Boone’s adult daughter, is a minor supporting character who galvanizes Boone’s conscience at his deathbed. Despite her brief appearance, she is a static, round character whose conflicted feelings over her father’s integrity affect her final interaction with him. Julia is a personal extension of Boone’s legacy in the world, and the way she reacts to him reflects his view of his own actions in life.

Saunders initially portrays Julia as a scatterbrained woman in search of something profound to say to her father at his deathbed. Though she professes gratitude for his ability to give her a comfortable life, she also feels conflicted by the awareness that his work has had a destructive impact on the environment. She cites a documentary about her father that her friend Fran made her watch, and though the viewing fractured Julia’s relationship with Fran, it planted doubt that her father’s professional career was above reproach. She expresses disappointment in Boone, but conditions it on Boone’s awareness that what he was doing was wrong. The fact that Boone feels bad after Julia’s visit signals that he is aware of his public duplicity, the impact of his company on the world, and the ways he’s repressed the ethics of his actions throughout his life.