Why So Many Contemporary Novelists Refuse to Name Their Narrators

By Grace Kim

Sam Sacks called it an "epidemic" in 2015, and a decade later the nameless narrator still dominates literary fiction. Katie Kitamura's Audition, Ben Lerner's Transcription, Deborah Levy's My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein and Rachel Cusk's Life of M all hinge on a protagonist the reader can never address by name.

That's the puzzle one essayist set out to crack: not whether the convention works, but what it's actually asking readers to notice. "I don't mind the nameless narrator as a convention," the writer admits. "I just don't know what they want from me."

What's the oldest reading of namelessness?

The standard interpretation goes back to the Everyman tradition and its modern descendant, Philip Roth's novel of the same name. Anonymity, the argument runs, turns the narrator into a vessel the reader can step into.

The essayist isn't convinced. What keeps them from identifying with the narrator of Fight Club, they note, isn't the absence of a name — it's that they don't want to be punched in the face.

There's a sharper paradox here. A friend who struggles with fiction explained that choosing a name locks in age, ethnicity and gender. Skip it, and you don't get universality; you get vagueness. As the essayist puts it, "universality is built in detail." In plausibly autobiographical fiction (autofiction, novels that blur memoir and invention), the name functions as a dial the author sets for how autobiographically we should read the character.

What does the withheld name actually do?

Here's the essay's central move: these narrators do have names. Daphne du Maurier's second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca has one we're told is "lovely and unusual." Maxim knows it. The staff at Manderley know it. Only the reader is locked out.

That means the device marks a shift in narrative position, not identity. The character isn't "everyone" or "no one." Their external form simply isn't shown to us. As the essayist frames it, "The story is shot from a camera mounted on the narrator's chest."

Kitamura's Audition pushes this further. Its unnamed actor seems to hold two consciousnesses at once: "Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind."

Where does the convention come from?

The answer runs through modernism. The nineteenth-century realist novel used an omniscient narrator, a God's-eye view surveying a comprehensively knowable world. Secularization, industrialization, World War I and Freud's popularizing of the subconscious broke that confidence. Modernism turned inward — Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, with its free indirect discourse (a technique that renders thought in the narrator's voice while staying in third person), became the model.

The unnamed narrator extends that project. If the modernist novel lets readers inside consciousness, namelessness refuses to let them step back out.

Lerner's Transcription makes the mechanism explicit. The narrator's 90-year-old mentor suggests the self is created when seen by someone else: "Did you know all melanin is brown. It is how the light strikes the iris, how it is reflected to the eyes of the other, that gives them color." Remove the name — the tool by which we conceptualize the other — and the external vantage point is gone. Should the narrator's eyes be blue, they will never be blue for us.

Levy's novel points to the same lineage through its subject. The narrator studies Gertrude Stein, whose project the book describes as an attempt "to uncreate herself as she had been created by her father, by her sneering professor at Johns Hopkins, by her brother, to undo the manner of the nineteenth century." What faster way to shed a self someone else chose for you than by shedding a name?

What does this change for readers?

Today's nameless narrators aren't twentieth-century modernists, and Levy names the difference: "Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen." The current epidemic, the essay argues, is a product of this century — of Transcription's subject, technology that "structures experience even when quiet."

Smartphones and social media sharpen the gap between the self we experience and the self others see. Less communal work and daily life make identity something defined privately. "It does seem like the question — are we looking or being looked at? — has a fraught cultural valence right now, at the same time as our narrators are losing their names."

The payoff for readers is a specific kind of awareness. When the essayist realizes, hundreds of pages in, that they never learned a narrator's name, their eye drifts off the page and the narrative walls become visible. They become more aware of what was held back — and that something is always being held back. That, more than identification or allegory, may be exactly what the convention is after.