The eponymous and only recurring character of the Robert Langdon series, Langdon is an art history professor specializing in the fictional field of “symbology,” the study of symbols and their historical meanings, at Harvard University. He is middle-aged, athletic, and wears a Mickey Mouse watch as a favorite keepsake. Langdon also has an eidetic memory, allowing him to remember almost anything he sees, and suffers from severe claustrophobia stemming from a childhood accident.

Langdon shares many qualities with the primary protagonists of other character-based thriller anthologies, like James Bond and Jack Reacher. Although the Robert Langdon novels almost always include ensemble characters, with the stories being told from many points of view, Langdon functions as the character most attuned to the reader’s path through the story. Thus, while other characters in the ensemble may begin by knowing more than Brown reveals to the reader in their POV chapters, Langdon’s accrual of knowledge is designed to most closely follow the reader’s accrual of the same. In Inferno, Langdon’s initial memory loss plays with this convention by putting Langdon’s and the reader’s sense of time off balance, fragmenting the narrative from Chapter 1. Langdon himself has already done more than he knows, and his uncovering of his lost memories becomes a vital method of understanding the chaos that is unfolding around him.