What’s in a Character’s Name?
A character’s name is one of the first decisions a fiction writer makes, and sometimes one of the hardest to undo. Long before the character has acquired a history, a voice, or a face, the writer has to call them something. That name may begin as a placeholder, but it rarely stays neutral. It starts to shape the character almost immediately.
Some fictional names feel so attached to their characters that it becomes difficult to imagine them belonging to anyone else. Humbert Humbert’s name has a smug, enclosed quality, with its repeated syllables and theatrical formality. Ebenezer Scrooge sounds pinched before he ever opens his mouth. Sethe, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, has a name that is stark and slightly mysterious. It seems to come from a distant world, as though it carries a history that the novel will only slowly reveal.
A name does not have to contain a hidden meaning to work. In fact, names chosen too obviously for their symbolism can easily make a character seem contrived. The most effective names often work through sound and association. John Singer, the deaf man at the center of Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, has a surname that suggests music, though he himself cannot speak and spends much of the novel listening to other people. McCullers does not call attention to the irony. The name simply adds another layer to his silence.
Names also help establish the social world of a novel. Edith Wharton’s Newland Archer and May Welland belong to a culture in which names say a lot about where you come from and how respectable you are. Their names sound proper because they have to. The characters in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son inhabit a very different world. Their nicknames seem to have been acquired through accidents, insults, and stories that no one quite remembers. Someone called Dundun or Fuckhead has already been placed inside a social order, however unstable that order may be.
This is why choosing a realistic name is not only a matter of checking whether people were actually called that in a given year. The name has to belong to the world of the book. It should reflect something of the character’s family, region, generation, religion, or class, even when none of those things are stated directly. Parents in a small Southern town will likely name their children differently from parents in Brooklyn, Lagos, or Buenos Aires. Two siblings may have noticeably different names because their parents’ tastes changed, or because one child was named after a grandparent and the other was not.
Names can also carry family expectations that the character never asked to inherit. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake builds an entire novel around this problem. Gogol Ganguli’s name comes from his father’s private history, but Gogol experiences it mostly as an embarrassment. It separates him from the American world around him without giving him an identity he can comfortably inhabit. When he begins calling himself Nikhil, the new name seems to offer another self: more confident, more adult, less burdened by explanation. Still, Gogol does not disappear. The earlier name remains tied to his childhood and to a story about his father that he only gradually comes to understand.
A new name can also become part of a larger attempt to escape the past. James Gatz turns himself into Jay Gatsby because the old name belongs to the life of poverty that he believes he can leave behind. Jay Gatsby sounds lighter and more elegant. It suits the man he plans to become. Fitzgerald’s choice is effective because both names remain present in the novel. Gatsby can invent a new identity, but James Gatz is never fully erased.
Names are also tied to power. Parents name children. Institutions record names, shorten them, misspell them, or refuse to pronounce them correctly. Immigrants may translate or alter their names. Lovers create private nicknames. Enemies use names as insults. To call someone by a certain name can express intimacy, authority, or contempt.
Ursula K. Le Guin makes this power literal in A Wizard of Earthsea. A person’s true name must be guarded because anyone who knows it gains power over them. Public names provide protection, while true names are shared only with those who are deeply trusted. The idea belongs to fantasy, but the feeling behind it is familiar. Most people know the difference between being called by the name they recognize as their own and being called something that feels imposed on them.
For a novelist, the difficulty is that names often have to be chosen before the characters are fully known. A writer may spend months with a temporary name and then find that the character has grown around it. The sound of it has entered the prose. Other characters have begun to speak it. Changing the name can feel strangely disruptive, even when the original choice was arbitrary.
Names are easy for a writer to stop noticing. After hundreds of pages, two similar names may no longer seem confusing, though a new reader continually mixes them up. A book coach might help a writer notice that several characters may have names of the same length or rhythm. A name may feel wrong for the character’s age, background, or region. Another may seem so symbolic that it gives away the writer’s intentions.
Writers find names everywhere: newspapers, cemeteries, school yearbooks, family stories, street signs, and overheard conversations. Sometimes a name is chosen for its history. Sometimes it is chosen because it sounds right beside a particular verb. Often the writer cannot explain why one name works and another does not. Eventually, the right name stops feeling chosen. It begins to feel like something the writer has learned about the character. By then, the name has taken on the weight of all the scenes in which it appears.
