The protagonist and narrator of Coming Up For Air, George Bowling, is a veteran of World War I and an insurance salesman, who describes himself as “fat as well as forty-five” (1). Bowling and his wife, Hilda, have two children, Lorna, 11, and Billy, 7. Bowling’s father and mother are dead, and his brother, Joe, disappeared when he was a teenager. The novel centers on Bowling’s journey to recapture the feeling of his youth in order to assuage his dissatisfaction with modern life. By the novel’s end, he concludes that the past is inaccessible and that war is inevitable. Bowling has false teeth, which make him feel confident, but is at times self-conscious about his weight, especially his stomach. His defining characteristics are his compulsive, intrusive fears about the upcoming war and his vivid nostalgia for the world he knew before World War I.

Bowling is an unreliable narrator, but not a malicious one. That is, he does not try to deceive the reader; however, his memories are often contradictory, and his stated opinions do not always align with the reality suggested by his narration. In the novel’s opening pages, for example, Bowling justifies keeping the money he won gambling a secret from his family because “[he’d] been a good husband and father for fifteen years and [he] was beginning to get fed up with it” (2).