• Age: 15 to 18
• Grade: 10 to 12

Jules Lebeuf is twenty-nine. After having spent some time working in the textile industry in Boston he returned to Montreal to study for his advanced degree. He spends from midnight until eight in the morning sweeping streetcars at the Hochelaga shops of the Metropolitan Transport Company. Jules is in a sense a man of two lives. His leisure time is spent with his student friends while his working hours are shared with 'Bouboule.' Bill, Charlot and other sweepers. Jules aims at writing a novel in which he hopes to bring to life the diversity of milieus with which he comes into contact. These include those of the derelict, the homosexual and the prostitute, which give The Brawl a naturalist tone. / Jules fails to achieve his intellectual purpose and is forced to abandon the writing of the great French-Canadian novel and to reconcile himself to his proletarian life. Lebeuf's Fate is interwoven with that of Weston who attempts a thesis on the French-Canadians, tears it up and returns to Missouri to become a journalist; and of Sillery who, defeated by his homosexual obsessions, goes to Africa to study anthropology.

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Gérard Bessette, born February 25, 1920 in Sainte-Anne-de-Sabrevois, Montérégie, Quebec, and died February 21, 2005 in Kingston, Ontario, was a French-speaking Canadian novelist, poet and literary critic. Originally from Quebec, he migrated to Ontario, and although his writings are often associated with Franco-Ontarian literature, his novels are mostly set in Quebec. He grew up in Montreal, where he received his classical education at the Collège Saint-Ignace and the Externat classique Sainte-Croix. He pursued his studies at the Université de Montréal, defending a doctoral thesis in 1950 titled Les Images dans la poésie canadienne-française (Images in French-Canadian poetry). He taught for seven years at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, USA (1951–1957). He then found a position in Kingston, Ontario, first at the Royal Military College of Canada in 1958, then at the Department of French Studies at Queen's University, where he worked from 1959 to 1979.