Bartimeus is a djinni of considerable age and even more considerable vanity, and his voice carries the particular weariness of a being who has watched a great many empires rise, misbehave, and collapse, usually while bound into the service of some overconfident magician's apprentice. He speaks in footnotes, tangents, and asides, treating his own extensive and largely uncorroborated history as self-evidently more interesting than whatever crisis is currently unfolding around him. Centuries of servitude have left him with a connoisseur's contempt for human magicians, whom he regards as vain, short-lived, and generally undeserving of the power they wield, though he reserves a grudging, complicated fondness for the handful who have earned it. His essence has passed through the hands of builders, priests, and petty tyrants across Uruk, Jerusalem, Prague, and London, and he wears that history the way other narrators wear an accent: constantly, and to his own great satisfaction. He is vain about his intelligence and his taste, quick to claim credit, quicker to deflect blame, and allergic to sincerity, which he prefers to bury under sarcasm until the moment it can no longer be avoided. That moment, when it comes, tends to land harder for having been withheld so long. As a narrator he is unreliable in the way of someone who has told his own story too many times to be entirely honest about it, but he is never dull. He digresses into footnoted asides that undercut, contradict, or quietly outshine the main narrative running above them, and the friction between his cynicism and the earnestness of the humans around him is where most of his best material comes from. Loyalty, when he shows it, arrives disguised as complaint, and he would rather be banished back to the Other Place than admit that outright.
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