Jake Epping is a high school English teacher with no real connections. He is divorced and has no girlfriend, children, or relatives in the area. He is a man with nothing to lose. It is for this reason that Al Templeton tells him about the rabbit-hole and his plan to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Al’s plan is full of hope and good intentions, and Jake falls quickly in line, finding the idea of making such a huge impact on the world irresistible. Jake is a kind, gentle man with a big heart despite his wife Christy’s insistence that he is unemotional. Jake wants to do what he can to improve the world.

The first indication of Jake’s kindness is his reaction to the story of Harry Dunning’s family massacre. Jake cries when he reads of the massacre, and two years later he thinks of Harry Dunning when he is presented with the opportunity to go back in time and change something. The idea of changing Harry’s life becomes Jake’s focus when he first learns the meager details Al has to share with him about time travel. Jake simply wants to make Harry’s life easier after witnessing his struggles as a lonely, uneducated man. However, Jake pursues this mission to change Harry’s life without stopping to think about the consequences or the potential outcome, or to wonder if Harry would even want his life to change.

After determining that he can alter the past without adversely impacting the future, Jake dives headfirst into changing the world. He saves the Dunning family a second time by committing murder, then saves a young girl from a lifetime in a wheelchair by spending a quiet afternoon with a kind, gentle man. From there, Jake stays quietly on his own, interacting little with the people around him until he feels a desire to return to teaching. Jake earns a degree from a degree mill and uses it to set up himself as a substitute teacher in Florida, showing that he needs to interact with other people even if it is on a limited basis. Keeping to himself until he can stop the assassination of President Kennedy is going to be close to impossible for Jake. This foreshadows his time in Jodie where he builds a community around himself, impacting multiple lives in various ways. However, Jake does not realize until much later that every interaction has a negative outcome for most of the people he cares the most for. Mike Coslaw tells Jake he changed his life by encouraging him to go into acting, but Mike’s girlfriend is disfigured in a car accident. Deke Simmons’s wife dies of cancer. But the ultimate sacrifice is when Jake’s girlfriend, Sadie, is murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald.

While Jake has a kind heart and a generous spirit, he is a man who dives into situations without considering the consequences. He thinks he has taken caution, but he hasn’t taken enough. By not considering how his actions might affect others, Jake leaves a wake of destruction behind him and threatens the very fabric of reality. When Jake is given the opportunity to set everything to rights, he takes it, but not before first creating more minor strings in time and leaving behind a manuscript that could cause even more destruction within reality. Jake grows and changes through his experiences, but he doesn’t change enough to keep from risking danger one last time.

Sadie Dunhill is the new librarian who comes to Jodie to replace Mimi Corcoran. Sadie stumbles into Jake’s life by tripping and falling into his arms. Jake claims it is not love at first sight, but it is clear there is an infatuation between these two that quickly builds into passion. Jake did not anticipate coming back in time and meeting the love of his life, but that is what happens. Sadie changes Jake’s life in ways neither of them could ever have predicted.

Sadie is an innocent woman who married a man she believed would be kind to her. She was not in love with Johnny Clayton, but her parents loved him, and she thought she could be happy with him. Sadie did not anticipate that Johnny would have a mental illness that would warp his approach to sex and therefore warp hers. Sadie proves herself to be strong by leaving Johnny in an era when women did not leave their husbands. Sadie tries to start over in Jodie, quickly falling in love with Jake only to discover he is a man with secrets. Sadie might be strong, but she struggles in leaving Jake because she knows deep down that he is a good man whom she loves. Perhaps it is this reason, more than his small confessions to her about his secrets, that allows her to take him back. It might even be her deep love for him that allows her to believe him when he says he has come from the future. Either way, without Sadie, Jake likely would not have made it to the School Book Depository to stop Lee Harvey in time. Yet Sadie pays the ultimate price for Jake’s mission.

Sadie plays several important roles in this novel. First, she is a distraction for Jake, allowing him to settle into a life that he could not have had in his own time. She becomes his reason for continuing on the path he has set out for himself, but she also becomes a conflict that leaves him struggling with the aftermath of his mission. He must decide if he will return to his own time, and if he will go alone. The closer he gets to the moment of truth, the more Jake struggles with the reality that he will likely need to return to his own time, leaving Sadie behind. While Jake never considers abandoning his mission to save President Kennedy, Sadie clearly plays a part in any hesitation he might have. But when the time comes, it is Sadie who plays the biggest role in helping Jake overcome the obstacles the obstinate past places in his way as he struggles to get to where he needs to be. Sadie encourages him to remember the name of the assassin and pushes him to regain his strength. She finds him the morning of 11/22/63 and gives him little option whether or not to take her along. Without Sadie, Jake might not have accomplished his ultimate goal. But Sadie pays with her life.

Al Templeton is only in the book briefly, but he is very important to the overall story line. He introduces Jake to the rabbit-hole and the possibility of changing the past. Al initially used the rabbit-hole to buy supplies for his diner on the cheap. However, as time went on, he began to think of the things he could change by using the rabbit-hole. Because the rabbit-hole opens up in 1958, he couldn’t change the events that led to either of the World Wars, but he could stop the assassination of JFK and possibly stop a series of race riots and the war in Vietnam that altered an entire generation. Al tried to do this on his own, but after just a few years, he developed lung cancer and had to return to 2011 to seek treatment. Unfortunately, his cancer was untreatable, perhaps because he tried to change the past. He tells Jake several times that the past is obdurate and is resistant to change. Jake himself became physically ill in his attempt to change Harry Dunning’s past, therefore it is not a stretch to imagine Al’s cancer might have been a result of his attempts to change JFK’s fate.

In addition to introducing the idea of changing the past to Jake, Al laid out a plan of how to do it. He first took on a test case, changing Carolyn Poulin’s past to see how changing one person’s past might impact the future. When nothing happened in the future other than Carolyn living a different life, Al felt secure in attempting to stop JFK’s assassination.

Al is the catalyst who sets up the entire premise of the novel. Unfortunately, Al paid for his attempt to change the past and took his own life. This sits as a warning to Jake that the past will do just about anything to resist change.

Harry Dunning is the janitor at Jake Epping’s high school in Lisbon Falls, Maine. He is a quiet, patient man with a limp and a simple way of expressing himself. Harry suffered a terrible tragedy as a child when his father broke into the family home on Halloween night and attacked the entire family with a 20-pound sledgehammer. Harry was the only survivor because he’d been in the bathroom when the attack began and was able to get under a bed, frustrating his father to the point where he gave up trying to get to him. Harry suffered blows to his leg and his head despite his escape and lived the rest of his life with a limp. After the attack, he lived with an aunt and uncle who took him out of school because the emotional fallout of his experience made him appear unable to learn.

Harry takes an adult education class Jake teaches at the high school. Jake reads a theme Harry wrote about the night of his father’s attack, and it touches Jake on an emotional level. Unable to forget the theme, Jake uses it to change the lives of the Dunning family when he goes back to 1958, the year the attack took place. Harry’s character does not really change in the novel, nor does Harry appear in more than a scene or two, but his story is so tragic and emotional for Jake that he uses it to save the entire family several times. 

John Fitzgerald Kennedy is a real person who appears in this novel peripherally. He was the 35th President of the United States. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.

After discovering the time portal, Al begins to wonder what the world would be like if Kennedy had never been assassinated. He believes that Kennedy’s assassination led to race riots, the murder of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and the escalation of the Vietnam War. In his view, Kennedy was on the verge of addressing the Civil Rights Movement in a way that might have had a better and quicker result than the actions taken by his predecessor. However, no one understands how time works and what might happen should something as big as the assassination of a US President might have as it ripples through the past, the present, and the future. This element that serves as the main theme of the novel.

Lee Harvey Oswald is a real person who appears as a major character in this novel. Lee Harvey was born in New Orleans not long after the death of his father and was raised by his mother, Marguerite. Lee Harvey and his mother had a close but complicated relationship that King explores in this novel. He joined the Marine Corps as a young man, clearly struggling as he was court martialed twice and jailed. After he was honorably discharged, he moved to the Soviet Union where he met and married his wife, Marina. Lee Harvey brought his wife and infant daughter June to the United States in 1962. In the novel, Lee Harvey is portrayed as a young, angry, and abusive man who is possibly reacting to an abusive childhood and manipulation by an older role model.

Lee Harvey had strong political opinions that sometimes clashed with those around him. He found a few friends in the Russian ex-pat community that he and Marina discovered in Texas shortly after their return, but he quickly alienated most of the community while his wife flourished. One friend who stuck by him was George de Mohrenschildt, a man born in the Soviet Union who became an American citizen. Some believe that George de Mohrenschildt worked for the CIA and used Lee Harvey to assassinate John Kennedy.

In the novel, King plays on the relationship between Lee Harvey and George de Mohrenschildt to suggest doubt that Lee Harvey was the sole mastermind and actor in the assassination of John Kennedy. By doing so, King builds tension in the novel by restraining Jake from simply killing Oswald the first time he sees him. Jake is an honorable man, and he does not want to take the life of an innocent or leave John Kennedy vulnerable by leaving a second actor alive.

Lee Harvey’s role in this novel is as a symbol of the darkness that exists in the world, as well as the reality of the unknowable that exists in every true crime story. Lee Harvey appears to be the evil Jake can control by taking him out of the equation. However, he learns in the aftermath that evil is much bigger and much more complicated than he originally understood.

George de Mohrenschildt is a real person who appears in this novel as a potential motivator in Lee Harvey’s decision to assassinate John Kennedy. In reality, George was investigated by the Warren Commission following the assassination of John Kennedy and was considered just a background player. In fact, George did not see Lee Harvey more than once after the assassination attempt on Edwin Walker. However, there have since been rumors that George was an informant for the CIA. King plays on these rumors in his novel; George manipulates Lee Harvey by talking him into the assassination attempt on Edwin Walker and putting the idea in Lee Harvey’s head to assassinate John Kennedy.

Frank Dunning is the father of Harry Dunning. He is a handsome, charismatic man who flirts with his customers at the Center Street Market, increasing his sales. Frank is the kind of man who appears happy and carefree to the world around him but is a dark, angry man on the inside. Jake sees indications that Frank is violent with his wife. When Jake speaks to Bill Turcotte, he learns that Frank likely murdered his first wife and child because the wife dared to stand up to him. The first time Jake goes back in time to stop Frank Dunning from murdering his family, he gives him the benefit of the doubt, not completely sure that Harry—who was only a child at the time—got all the facts straight. However, as he follows him and learns more about him from the locals, he recognizes the signs of alcoholism that he witnessed when his wife Christy struggled with this. Jake knows that being an alcoholic does not make someone a murderer, but it does suggest that Harry’s recollection of his father being drunk the night he murdered the whole family is true. In the end, Jake witnesses Frank Dunning attempt to murder his family—and succeed in killing his son Tugga—and this gave him the confidence in Frank’s guilt to go back in time a second time to stop the murders, killing Frank while he was alone in a quiet cemetery. This act allowed Jake to discover his own ability to murder when he found it necessary and prepared him for the battles he would face as he lived in the past and prepared to change JFK’s fate.

Bill Turcotte is a working man Jake runs into outside a bar his first day in Derry. Jake asks Bill, whom he referred to as “No Suspenders” at the time, if he knows a man named Dunning. Bill told him that there are a lot of Dunnings in Derry. Jake dismisses the interaction as inconsequential until he begins seeing Bill every time he is downtown and in a local bar the morning of Halloween when Jake stops by to use the bathroom.

Jake has no reason to believe Bill might have reason to interfere with his attempt to save the Dunning family on Halloween until just a few hours before he expects Frank to show up. That’s when Bill uses a bayonet to hold Jake hostage behind the Dunning home and tells him the story of his sister, who was Frank’s first wife. Bill wants to get revenge on Dunning because he believes that Frank killed his sister and her baby. However, it has been 20 years, and Bill has never done anything to Frank. When Jake tells him that Frank is going to kill his family, Bill insists that they let him so that he will go to prison. In the end, however, Bill displays great courage when he fights through the symptoms of a heart attack and uses the bayonet to kill Frank, just as Frank is about to kill Jake.

General Edwin Walker is a real person who appears in this novel and was a general in the United States Army. A white supremacist, Edwin Walker held strong racist political opinions that he often expressed when he was in uniform, something he was admonished for by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When he was accused of attempting to influence the votes of his soldiers, he offered his resignation, and it was accepted by President Kennedy. On April 10, 1963, someone attempted to shoot Edwin Walker through a window in his home. The bullet missed. During the Warren Commission’s investigation into the assassination of John Kennedy, it was determined that Lee Harvey Oswald was behind the assassination attempt.

Edwin Walker appears in this novel as an opportunity for Jake to determine if Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone in the assassination of John Kennedy. If Jake can observe the attempted assassination of Edwin Walker and see that Lee Harvey acted alone, he could safely assume that the same is true of the assassination of John Kennedy. For this reason, April 10 becomes a focal point for Jake as he believes it would be safer and cleaner to stop Lee Harvey long before the November attack on John Kennedy. This parallels Jake’s actions to stop Frank Dunning the second time around and will potentially make it possible for Jake to remain in the 1960s after his mission is complete. However, touching on the theme of time harmonizing itself, Jake is unable to observe Lee Harvey on the night of April 10 because of Johnny Clayton’s attack on Sadie, which parallels the attack on Doris Dunning by Frank Dunning.