Hugh Wolfe is the protagonist of the story. He is a mill worker who is separate from the mill workers around him, due to his artistic gifts. At the same time, his working-class origins separate him from cultivated men such as Mitchell and Dr. May, who can appreciate his art. Wolfe is therefore stranded, in a kind of limbo between one social world and another. His stranded situation, and his inarticulacy even to himself, give him a volatility as a character. While he is ultimately imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit—the theft of Mitchell’s money—there is a sense in the story that he would have come to another bad end if not that one, since there is no place in the world for a man like him.

Wolfe’s inarticulacy is due to his life of punishing physical labor, which allows for no reflection or no perspective. As the narrator makes clear several times, the toll that this sort of life takes on the soul as is severe and tragic as any physical toll. Wolfe’s meeting with Mitchell, by suggesting to Wolfe the existence of a world where he might belong, serves only to further destabilize him; it is this meeting, more than the subsequent theft of Mitchell’s money, which marks the story’s real turning point.