When anonymity turns out to be more revealing

Names are personal, specific, and powerful — they tell us something about a character, implicitly or explicitly. In fiction, names are often carefully chosen to leave us with certain impressions. Consider how Ariadne, the architect in Inception who creates the dream mazes, shares her name with a princess from a Greek myth who famously navigates the Minotaur’s labyrinth. In Anita Desai’s Rosarita, a young woman discovers that her mother, Sarita, might have lived in Mexico briefly, but goes by the more Spanish-sounding ‘Rosarita.’ A name can locate a character in space and time, and help build an impression of a character as much as physical descriptions do. But what happens when we are invited into the perspective of a character without ever knowing their name? 

An unnamed narrator can offer us a blank slate, where a character’s personality, origin, and location take a backseat to their experience. In Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, leaving the protagonist unnamed emphasises the thinness of the barrier between her and the world. The narrator works at the International Court of Justice, where she interprets court proceedings — the trials of politicians and presidents accused of war crimes. She lives between languages and subjectivities, at times interpreting for victims, at other times for the perpetrators. Through Intimacies, the narrator feels unmoored, in her life, her relationships, and her job. She doesn’t quite know who she is, living closely with other people’s words and experiences. Her unnamedness is just another aspect of this fluidity of the self. 

How would we respond if we did not know our character’s names, or where they are? Both character and country are left unnamed in Maya Binyam’s spectacular novel Hangman, as we follow a man migrating from a nameless country (maybe the USA) to another country in Sub-Saharan Africa. The book unfolds like a surreal, Lynchian dream sequence, populated with strange characters and interactions. As in a dream, identities blur. Binyam balances her narrative between universality and specificity, keeping us on our toes, and constantly reframing our view of characters, setting, and the narrator’s perception of reality itself. By refusing to anchor her story in time and space, Binyam emphasises the absurdity of her narrative, the disorienting experience of migration, and the liminal space between the self and the other. 

Sometimes, an unnamed narrator feels like someone keeping secrets — an intentional withholding of information. In Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, we are told that the namelessness of our narrator is a necessity — four women on a research expedition into a strange area of land are told to only refer to each other by their designations. The book takes the form of a journal of one of the women, a biologist, a record she keeps of her experience inside what is called Area X. This namelessness is offered to us as proof of some kind of objectivity. But as Annihilation progresses, and she encounters the mysteries of Area X, we realise how flimsy that objectivity is, as any sense of reality and truth crumbles for both character and reader — and slowly, we begin to see a version of the biologist that she’s kept hidden from us, and from herself.

Reading a story from a character’s perspective naturally encourages intimacy and empathy — we’re seeing the world the way they see it, stepping into their shoes. A nameless character can lean into this intimacy, as Intimacies does, or use it to pull the rug out from under our feet, as Binyam does again and again in Hangman. The next time you read a book with an unnamed narrator, ask yourself — how does this book create that intimacy? How does it think of empathy? And what can this anonymity reveal about the self?

The author is a writer and illustrator.  Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.