What's in a Name?

    "Nice to meet you wayward protagonist. Everyone around here calls me Grendel."

So you've got this idea for the next great Canadian novel, a truly staggering work of modernity that will change life as we know it and propel you to literary success. Before planning your Man Booker acceptance speech, you realize your entire manuscript is littered with gender neutral pronouns. After considering the potential of a post-modern masterpiece, you decide maybe it's time to go back to page one, and name some of these people.

But, but.. what about the fates of "Tall Child", "The Parent", and the beloved "Old Coot"? You're really telling me to delete all the "I's" in my first person narrative?

Well...yes.

Unless you have a really good reason for not telling us the names of characters, we're eventually gonna need some sort of identifiers to run with. By naming a character, we give it an identity; through identity we breathe life into the people/animals/hobgoblins in our stories. Remember that Heritage Moment? The one where Molly Johnson and Patrick O'Neill plead to keep their Irish names when they are adopted? The orphans want to keep their names because it's the only identity they have. Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post stresses the importance of what a name means to John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible:

As I pondered this on the way to work one morning, I remembered John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” Specifically, I remembered the absolute anguish of Daniel Day Lewis’s John Proctor from the movie version. Much is made, in literature classes, about Proctor’s refusal to allow Danforth and Parris to visibly show his name to the village as proof that he confessed.

PROCTOR: Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life. Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul, leave me my name!

To Proctor, his name is synonymous with his existence. Without a name he isn't worth "the dust on the feet of them that hang." This 'name' thing seems like a pretty big deal to the guy.

So by taking in consideration the power of names, it's important to choose one that's appropriate. If you decide to name your moon wizard "Jesus," your readers will be bringing their own connotations to your writing. Is this wizard going to do something that may or may not be like another famous Jesus? Your telling me that your space pirate is just coincidentally named Ahab? If you aren't ready to answer these questions, it might be best to stay away from really obvious established names.

                                       "No, you can't call me Yoshi."

Consider Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Yes, this is a guy that names someone Major Major, but also manages to have an incredibly unique name for his protagonist: Yossarian. I don't think I've encountered anyone other "Yossarians", and for good reason. It's a name that is wholly unique to the character, and would be more than a little off-putting to find someone named Yossarian in a spooky YA novel.

As writers, it is your job to make deliberate choices. Nothing should be coincidence or chance when you are creating, and the same goes for names. This was going to be the part where I go on a tirade about the meaning of characters names in Breaking Bad (Did you know Schrader is German for 'cutting off'?), but I'll spare you. What I was trying to get across through my tangent was that names brings into form the character we've created and define them, and are key components to storytelling. So if you decide to re-think your gender-neutral pronoun post-modern space opera, consider maybe calling your protagonist something like "Gregory."


Source:

The importance of a name (Washington Post)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/19/the-importance-of-a-name/

(Yossi's April Congressional Mega-Article)

http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/-pcp-yossi-039-s-april-congressional-mega-article-2249841/1/20

What Would Jesus Do?. ethics,compassion,empathy,jehovah,watchtower,poetry,philosophy,atheism,animal rights 

http://smmcroberts.net/ethics/wwjd.html