Yeshua feels pity for those who cannot be the good people he is convinced that they essentially are. The distinguishing characteristic of this very human Jesus, who feels fear and pain like anyone, is the courage not to violate his conscience.

This courage links him with the Master. In the corrupt Moscow society, in which Woland catches everyone violating what he or she knows to be right, the image of Yeshua’s accepting death rather than submission to a violent state is a powerful one. It is Yeshua who is able at the end of the novel to forgive the man who has condemned him. A biblical as the characterization of Yeshua is, the moral influence of Jesus is nevertheless brilliantly communicated in his simple actions and words. He belongs to the transcendental group, though so human in his depiction. At the end, he and Pilate continue their conversation. The polar figures of state and conscience are left in dialogue: “Perhaps they can work something out.”

The Master is, in his commitment to truth and the freedom of the artist, a dropout from Soviet society but, worse from Bulgakov’s point of view, he is a dropout from his commitment to continue writing. While hostile criticism and cowardly censorship do not in themselves crush the Master, he begins to break when he realizes that the whole campaign against him is false: The people who write against him are not saying what they believe. This response strikes fear into his heart and makes him feel that “some very cold, supple octopus was fastening its tentacles round my heart”; in despair, he burns his manuscript. He overcomes his fear and despair only with Woland’s help, saying that he has been through everything that a man can go through and that nothing can frighten him any longer. “Where else can such wrecks as you and I find help except from the supernatural?” he asks Margarita. The Master is prescient throughout, as Yeshua is, and as the young poet Bezdomny increasingly is: All the creative characters are linked. Though a man of this world and time, the Master can, through his art, guess at enduring realities.

Compassion is Margarita’s dominant characteristic, and her pity touches all those damaged by the difficulties of life, both in the underworld at Satan’s ball and in Moscow. In the ironic twist that only by bargaining with the Devil is a person able to help anyone in Moscow, she becomes not the passive Marguerite in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808, 1833) but the Faustian figure itself: She becomes a witch in order to gain the power to help her beloved. While not herself prescient, her sympathy, loyalty, and appreciation of excellence enable her to join the heroic group. She becomes, by the end of the novel, a mater dolorosa, like Mary in an icon, because she has suffered herself, borne the suffering of others, and yielded her hard-earned wish to a woman suffering more than she.

It is appropriate to consider Griboyedov a sort of collective character in the novel. The building for the support and entertainment of the literary establishment in Moscow summarizes the value system to which the major characters are opposed: greed, bourgeois luxurious living, toadying, lying, stupidity, jealousy, self-interest, cowardice, disloyalty, atheistic amorality. Bulgakov puts into the image of the arts community everything that the octopus in the Master’s fearful dream implies about state control of the arts and the self-satisfied vulgarity resulting from the power of the mediocre over the gifted. When the building burns at the end of the book, the villain is defeated as surely as in any melodrama.

While it's risky to scrutinize a writer's biography too deeply for literary prototypes, certain parallels between historical figures and characters in The Master and Margarita can shed light on Bulgakov's life, if not necessarily his literary work. Many aspects of the Master character clearly echo Bulgakov himself. Margarita largely represents Elena Shilovskaya, whom Bulgakov met in 1929 and married in 1932 as his third wife. The literary hack Ahriman is a composite of several mediocre Moscow writers and critics whose public attacks significantly hindered Bulgakov's ability to publish. Notably, Leopold Averbakh, a literary theoretician with influential but narrow-minded views in the late 1920s and early 1930s, stands out among these figures. The character Mstislav Lavrovich may parody Soviet playwright Vsevolod Vishnevsky, whose dubious activities in the 1930s contributed to the arrest and murder of renowned Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. The spy Baron Meigel is likely modeled after Baron Shteiger, a real spy tasked with monitoring foreign diplomats in Moscow.

Several characters are drawn from the Bible: Yeshua-Ha-Nozri is Bulgakov's literary version of Jesus; Mathu Levi is based on the disciple Matthew; Yehuda represents Judas; Azazello is derived from Azazel, "the demon of the desert" in the Book of Leviticus; and Abaddon comes from Abaddon, the "demon of death and destruction" mentioned in the Books of Job, Proverbs, and Psalms. Woland embodies Bulgakov's vision of the devil. The second-rate poet Ivan Homeless is often likened to the Russian folkloric figure Ivanushka-the-Fool. Some critics have noted specific parallels between Woland and Joseph Stalin, Fagot and Viacheslav Molotov, and Behemoth and Marshal Klement Voroshilov, although these comparisons offer little insight into the novel or Bulgakov's biography. More intriguing are the numerous accurate geographical references to Moscow locations. Most streets and places mentioned in the novel can be found on a map of Moscow, and Bulgakov's description of events at the Griboyedov House (in the chapter of the same name) is a heavily satirical yet faithful portrayal of what one might have encountered at the Writers' Union House in Moscow during the 1930s.