Karakterler

Aubert Thün

Master Zacharius's only apprentice, he is the symbol of a firm and rational stance. He is the only talented worker to whom Zacharius has been able to entrust his privacy and all the complex secrets of his workshop to this day. However, his master has never truly attributed the value of a human being to him; the reason Aubert endures all that torment in his master's workshop is his heroic loyalty to the beautiful Gérande, whom he secretly adores. Throughout all the madness, he represents good sense, striving to explain facts through gear wear and logic rather than supernatural obsessions.

Gérande

Master Zacharius's eighteen-year-old daughter. Growing up without a mother, she spent her youth in the derelict workshop, looking after her old master's health and clinging to divine values. With her pure and self-sacrificing character, she is the main center of Aubert's great loyalty. Within the novel's dark progression, she is represented as the luminous face of Catholic faith, purity, and love. She attempts to pull her father out of his spiritual hell by remaining pathologically loyal to him no matter what, but ultimately faces becoming the ruthless and tragedy-filled victim of demonic demands.

Scholastique

Master Zacharius's old, grey-haired house servant. In addition to the maternal affection she feels for Gérande, she carries all the chatty dynamic of the street and home. Her faith in her master is absolute, but she hears the 'witchcraft' claims emerging in town. Although superstitious, she tries every prayer she can muster to protect the household by taking refuge in divine authority (the church and prayers).

Senyör Pittonaccio

A freakish and grotesquely appearing, mysterious humanoid entity that represents time or death, or even the Devil himself. He resides in the castle as the owner of the final clock manufactured by Master Zacharius (the clock in the Andernatt Castle), which featured iron puppets. He comes to Geneva and insidiously makes the condition that Gérande be given to him. He seems to have taken hold of the mind of the master, whose death warrant he brings, by 'transforming the time of death into clocks that are the cipher of life.' He is a symbolic demon that tears through the boundary between life and death, God and the devil.

Master Zacharius

He is the greatest and most famous watchmaker Geneva has ever seen. This philosophical genius, who turned the science of watchmaking into a religion and himself into the perfect god of that religion, invented the 'clock escapement.' He falls into the greatest physical and psychological crisis of his life when the clocks he designed and sold suddenly begin to stop one by one. He has an absolute belief that his own life force and soul are imprisoned within the flexibility of the springs he created. His desire to live becomes so selfish that, succumbing to his arrogance, he sacrifices his daughter and even his religious faith to a person who is a symbol of a demon or curse. In the end, he fails to save his soul, which is trapped in a hellish castle, and becomes a victim of overstepping his scientific boundaries and defying God.