The touchstone character of the novel is Ivan Homeless, who is there at the start, is radically changed by his encounters with Woland and the master, becomes the latter’s ‘disciple’ and continues his work, is present at almost every turn of the novel’s action, and appears finally in the epilogue. He remains an uneasy inhabitant of ‘normal’ reality, as a historian who ‘knows everything’, but each year, with the coming of the spring full moon, he returns to the parable which for this world looks like folly.
