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Charles
Charles Ryder is a middle-class boy sent to Oxford by his dithering and slightly defective father, who, following the death of Charles' mother in Serbia during the Great War, has never been quite right. At Oxford, he soon becomes acquainted with Sebastian Flyte and, by his second year, he has abandoned all his other friends and attached himself to Sebastian. During the period of this intense friendship, Charles, an artist, becomes acquainted with Sebastian's family and their home at Brideshead.
Following Sebastian's surrender to drink, Charles leaves Oxford for art school. He marries a woman whom he does not love, Celia, and later begins a relationship with Sebastian's sister, Julia, almost solely because she reminds him so much of him. The book both begins and ends with Charles as an officer in the army to which he has run following the disintegration of all his relationships and his conversion to Roman Catholicism, something very important to the Flyte family.