Harrier "Harry" Du Bois
Fictional character — the player-character and protagonist of Disco Elysium. Lieutenant- level detective in the Revachol Citizens Militia (RCM), Precinct 41 (the Jamrock precinct). Born in Revachol's Old Military Hospital in the Pox in the year '07; at the game's present approximately forty-four years old. Begins the game with an extreme drug- and alcohol-induced amnesia, having destroyed his hotel room and lost his service pistol and badge; spends the rest of the game piecing his own identity back together while attempting to solve the murder of the hanged mercenary at the Whirling-in-Rags hostel.
Stake§
Harry's narrative stake is his own identity. The amnesia framing forces the player to choose, dialogue by dialogue, what kind of detective and what kind of person Harry has been and is becoming. The dialogue options range from the catastrophically self-destructive (Disco-themed personality with the horrific necktie as personification of the hyperactive bad-decision-making side) to the slowly-recovering; most playthroughs land somewhere in the contested middle, with no path to clean redemption.
Harry is the figure through whom Disco Elysium tests its central design proposition: that the player should inhabit a character whose internal life is so fragmented that it is literally voiced by twenty-four separate skill-personalities arguing with each other. The protagonist is not a tabula rasa but a wreck — a previously-functioning detective who has been disintegrating over the years before the game's opening and whose specific shape is determined by which of the twenty-four voices the player gives most weight to. Inland Empire-Harry talks to inanimate objects and senses Pale-adjacent phenomena; Logic-Harry reasons his way through evidence in the conventional CRPG-detective register; Electrochemistry-Harry relapses into drug-and- alcohol use whenever the option presents itself.
The backstory the player gradually recovers includes a Revachol upbringing in working-class Jamrock, a teenage period in a street gang called the Fifteenth Indotribe, an unhappy career as a high-school gym teacher in Grand Couron, the failed engagement to Dora Ingerlund (who left him roughly six years before the game's present), and the eighteen-year RCM career during which Harry climbed to the rank of lieutenant and twice refused promotion. The horrific necktie is the symptom — bought at some unrecoverable point, gradually invested with the projected personality of Harry's self-destructive id.
Harry is one of the most sophisticated player-characters in CRPG history. The amnesia is not the plot device of forgetting-and-discovery so much as the narrative excuse for letting the player co-author a character across a wide span of possible personalities. His relationship with Kim Kitsuragi — the patient partner-detective the player is given — is the moral compass the game gives the player against which to read whatever Harry the playthrough is producing. The game's variability is partly the variability of who Harry can become.