Old John, the sometimes-narrator of the novel and movie, is an eighty year old man. He is married to the youthful--but ageless--Mina. Young John, of course, is his avatar: the twenty year old version of himself.

"Nevertheless we must note: this morning the checker in the grocery store treated him like a doddering old fool, he was fumbling for his change, this is true, dimes, nickels, pennies, who can keep track of such things, he paid for his soy milk and his ibuprofen and returned home sullen and distraught. It is an ancient whine—a whine more ancient than we are—that the years have fled too rapidly, that time is a relentless enemy, that the world has become a strange and dishonest place...."