Spencer Brydon is the protagonist of the story. He is an expatriate who has come back to the US to handle his properties. From the very opening of the story, Brydon characterizes himself as an outsider: He is introduced explaining that he usually avoids questions because he is positive his thoughts are relevant only to him. It emerges that Brydon was also estranged from his relatives and is now the only surviving member of his family, further underscoring his isolation. Likewise, he professes discomfort both with the urbanized and mercenary turn of modern American culture and with the time he spent in Europe, which he characterizes as directionless and self-indulgent. In speaking of that period of his life, he references “the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim” (Chapter 1, Paragraph 4).

This inability to be at home anywhere stems in part from The Fear of Missed Opportunity. Brydon is reluctant to take definite action for fear of closing off some other path, but his very inaction has by this point shaped the course of his life. Consequently, he obsesses over alternate possibilities, which causes the main conflict of the story: his rendezvous with his alter ego.