Characters with no names
I've got a few short stories going, and I've foregone naming any of my characters. It started because I just didn't have any good names in my head and I was going to take care of it later, but now I'm considering leaving them all nameless. It's worked well for the first four stories, but I have between ten and twelve stories in mind for this collection, and I am wondering if I should just continue without naming anyone. Most of my stories have between two and four characters, and so far I've been able to get away with referring to them by one or two traits. For instance,
- The man in the pink shirt
- The woman in the Claims Department
- The second boyfriend
I realize that these names are kind of generic, but it works. So far.
I would like to know if anyone has any feedback about the relative merits of an entire collection of stories (or at least about 10) without named characters.
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It can be simply a tool an author will use to keep the character autonymous. The character can be an "everyman." The experience of the character is a universal exoerience and therefore can be you or me or anyone......
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It adds a little difficulty to reading and thus a little chance to screwing up.
Although, especially in first-person stories it's a very common and quite nice literary tool to leave the protagonist both nameless and devoid of most physical traits that are not essential to the plot. This makes immersion easier: every reader can imagine themselves in place of the protagonist and fit in just fine. (and it's easier with 1st person perspective, "I" in narration is unambiguous.)
Still, make sure to give your characters easy to remember (and distinct! Avoid names with identical two first letters on somewhat similar characters!) whenever lack of names is confusing. If seven people in a room discuss, you'll have a hard time making the scene not suck without using at least a few names.
Too many names are bad. If a name appears once or twice per whole story it's poor style - it's much better to give the character some very memorable traits (not pink shirt, but rather a glass eye and chipped front tooth), if they are to reappear seven chapters apart, when the reader would long forget the name (and even more so the pink shirt). Do NOT depend on the reader remembering given name. If a character who is not very memorable returns, give a brief synopsis on when they were seen last, a reminder of where they are recurring from.
Episodic characters may be quite featureless and very generic - if you take time to give a precise description, you focus the reader's attention, they will try to remember the character, and will be pissed at you for wasted effort if the character never reappears.
In the end, the merits are either easier immersion in case of 1st person protagonist, or leaving the characters more impersonal, more distant and harder to relate with (e.g. in Grimm tales). Still, the "nameless character" is correctly executed if the reader asked about the character's name after reading the whole story goes "It's... oh wait, it wasn't mentioned even once, was it?" Essentially, if the lack of name becomes too apparent, you're doing it wrong.
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I found that when I was reading a collection of Grimm's fairytales — just translated, not the bowdlerized Disney versions — a whole bunch of them have nameless characters. The King, The Queen, The Prince; the baker's daughter, the tailor's apprentice. Puss in Boots is the only character with a name in his story; the rest are the miller's son, the king, his daughter, and the ogre. (The Marquis is a title which Puss invents.) And all those have lasted for hundreds of years.
As long as the reader can keep the characters straight, I say go for it.
ETA I forgot that Larry Niven's Kzin race don't have names at birth; they have to earn them.
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