Paterson is introduced in Book 1 as the name of the city of Paterson, New Jersey, as well as Paterson, the character. Using the same name for both is one of several ways that Williams makes connections between the two through connecting the body of Paterson the man with the city itself. Paterson the man acts throughout all five Books as an authorial stand-in for William Carlos Williams, and at times, the boundary between Williams-as-character and Paterson blurs, especially in some of the sections where letters are collaged into poetry.

As a character, Paterson is a protagonist who acts to ground the abstraction of Williams’s images: his personhood is a place for readers to return to after Williams’s flights of fancy. He’s described as an Everyman character: a poet-doctor who enjoys close observation of both the human and the natural worlds around himself. Paterson spends most of Book 2 acting as a readerly voyeur in a walk through the park. In other sections, he’s written to as Dr. P or referred to simply as Paterson. He is unconstrained by traditional morals and morality; in Book 4, he takes a mistress despite being married. He is highly interested in sexuality and especially in exceeding the boundaries of traditional decorum for someone of his social standing.