Pierre Menard is the protagonist, and the critic’s analysis of Menard’s work forms the backbone of the story. Despite Menard’s importance to the narrative, he never directly appears in the text, but rather is quoted and analyzed by the critic, who is the narrator of the story.

Pierre Menard is characterized as an early 20th-century French poet and writer, whose works have gained widespread recognition by the time that the critic is writing about them. Menard is portrayed as prolific, with a number of academic and creative works enumerated by the critic to challenge the catalog composed by Mme. Henri Bachelier. Menard also has a personal relationship with the critic, with a couple of his letters to the critic quoted at length within the text.

Menard himself does not change over the course of the text, as the story takes on the form of a piece of literary criticism, which does not contain a scene-by-scene narrative but rather serves to analyze a text and the career of an author as a whole. However, what the reader knows of Menard does shift throughout. Early on, Menard is characterized purely through his literary output, and the reader gets the sense that Menard is educated, intelligent, and creative.