Is there any limit on how long a story can progress without the reader knowing the name of the character introduced so far?

Question

So far, I've written about 10,000 words or so and have yet to name the character. I've talked about the character a lot. But no name yet. He's the ONLY character so far. I'm pretty sure that I don't have to mention his name yet, coz my character has been alone for the entire time. Also, so far, I've used only First Person POV.

Is it awkward or uncomfortable for the reader not to know the name of my character?

Maybe I should've mentioned this too. I don't plan to keep him unnamed for the entire story. Or even for a significant amount. Right now, there's no reason for my character's name to be mentioned. Depending on the answer, I would've decided if the character HAD to have a name and would've found some way to insert it in.

Answer 1

You can do just about anything, including leaving a character unnamed, as long as you do it well.

If we're in first-person POV, then leaving the character unnamed could be a way to invite the reader to identify with the character.

So, yeah, you can totally do it.

However, if you plan to reveal the character's name eventually, then it would probably be best to do so up front. Otherwise, when you finally get around to it 370 pages in, it may seem weird or jarring. Your reader might be all, "Wait...seriously? SIMONE? I didn't picture her as a 'Simone' at all. I was thinking more along the lines of a 'Janet.' Now I'm confused and distressed. I'm gonna to put this thing down and take a nap."

Potentially ok if done well: letting a character go nameless as creative choice.

Probably not so great: neglecting to mention a character's name because it hasn't come up.

Answer 2

There are tons of beautiful stories out there with unnamed characters. Aimee Bender's collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is full of them. None of the characters in Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," one of the best-known stories, are given names. In Aesop's Fables we don't learn the names of the hare or tortoise, or the ant or grasshopper.

You'll find plenty of precedence for unnamed characters in short fiction. I'm not as familiar with novels, but Cormac McCarthy's The Road does that. There must be other good examples.

If it works in your story, then go ahead boldly.

Answer 3

There may be a good reason to do this. But in general I'd say, don't.

We normally identify people by their names. Sometimes we use a title or capsule description, like "the mayor" or "Sally's brother", if we don't know the person's name or if the description is important or is how the person is addressed. Referring to a person regularly without using a name or title is just ... odd.

It's perfectly good and valid to do something odd in a story. But only if the point is to highlight that it is odd. If your hero has amnesia and doesn't know his own name, or if the point is that he is living in total isolation and so there is no one to address him by name, not mentioning his name could certainly highlight this. I recall reading a story many years ago -- right now I don't recall anything about it but this one sentence -- where a man is stranded somewhere for many years, and when he is finally found someone calls him by name, and the writer says, "He slowly realized that this was his name. It had been so long since he had heard it."

But without a good dramatic reason, if you're just doing it because you think it's cool to be unconventional or you haven't needed it so far or something, I wouldn't.

It would be especially jarring to the reader if this character is just "I" and "me" for half the story and then suddenly others refer to him as "Mr Miller" or whatever. If done wrong, the reader might be asking, "Miller? Who's that? Who's this new character who has been introduced and where did he come from?"

Answer 4

Generally people read for details.

On 12 December 2014, Captain James D. Arkey sat in front of his computer and typed furiously. His mind began calculating and he squinted at the response code that appeared on his screen and slammed a fist down on his desk. "They couldn't have," Arkey yelled at empty office. "Those dirty rotten..." A thought occurred to him and he opened another shell window and connected to the DefCon server.

Contrast that to the following:

A person sat at a desk doing a thing. The person did some other things and yelled out at the walls, "They couldn't have!" The person slammed a fist on the desk the person was sitting at.

Details are the reason people read. Especially fiction.

Also, what's the reality of that? How many people do you not know their name (or even a handle/nickname/whatever) and yet you are interested in what they are doing?

I suggest you provide lots of details. Many amateurs think they are writing something mysteriously interesting because they are keeping a name mysterious. But it is rare that such non-detailed writing holds a reader's interest.

Answer 5

If you intentionally do not want to reveal your character's name, this could be a very interesting way to write your story; it might become awkward to read, however, although less so if you're writing in first person: in this case the reader only learns the character's name once another character calls him out.

The character himself knows his name; he doesn't need to think about it every hour of the day; usually you'll need to introduce it for the reader, but it remains information that can be given very late in the story, if you're careful to keep the reading comfortable without it.

Answer 6

When reading a story, the reader requires additional information to be connected in some way with information that came prior — if it is a continuous narrative.
With a discontinuous narrative, the reader will be looking for ways to fit the fragments of information together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Elsewise, they might as well be touring a museum of modern art.

Now, there is some confusion as to the function of ‘names’. Briefly, most names as we know and use them are simply abbreviated handles, or labels, for the purposes of swift and easy identification.
As some other answers noted, if your story was done from POV of the unnamed character, then there is less need for name — but that doesn't mean that it can't occur.
Are you in need of a recognizable, succinct, and semantically portable noun whereby to identify a personage to your readers?

A narration can continue with the absence of anything so long as that thing is not a necessary component thereof: if there is a place where something should occur, and it doesn't, then readers will notice.
“Is this person afraid to utter that name?”
“Did the writer forget that the main character hasn't been given a name yet?”

Once you do give something, it follows that such revelation should be connected with previous parts of the narration.
How exactly to maintain a chain in a narration, and when it is possible to sever or fragment that chain, depends on many things:

• the intelligence, attentiveness, and recall of the reader
• the intelligibility of the prose — if it is confusing and muddled, or otherwise difficult to read
• the rewards gained by delving into the prose — if a reader sees evidence of profound investment in the writing, i.e. gaining insights by contemplating even terse or obscure writs, then they could be annoyed and disinterested but they won't think the writer inept or a hack

A ‘name’ as a part of the narrated events is exactly that; do not introduce them in any way that seems inexcusably contrived unless such is purposefully required — i.e. it only seemingly ex machina. If so, however, keep in mind that you ought be at a certain level of trust with your readers.

A ‘name’ used to conveniently identify a character or other personage to your readers serves a narrative function. Any such devices are usually referred to as, well, narrative devices.
The exact definition and optimal implementation of a narrative device varies, but they typically can be grouped into two original classes:

• voice of the narrator
  This should be intuitive enough: Once upon a time, there was a certain woman. Let us refer to her as Alice, for that is — suitably enough — her given name.
  The narrator could be one of the persons featured in the story, it may be a layer that exists between the story and the reader, or it may be the author. It could be personified, or it could simply be a certain attitude and vocabulary conveyed by the choice of words and grammar.
• premise or foundation of the story
  If something is given as a precept or axiom, not explored narratively, or otherwise taken for granted. It could be that you want to explore some strange and bizarre medical condition, and how it compares to so–called “normal life”, and the triumph of Love or whatever, but you don't really want to explore the clinical diagnoses or origins of the condition itself.

Answer 7

It is easier to do this is your character is the narrator, since they will always refer to themselves as "I," and in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I don't remember ever learning the narrator's name. This also works best when the story is a very clean reader-self-insert like Japanese Light Novels, where the characters actions and description can fit practically anybody (although that is also bad writing for having a main character). Some video games, such as Half-Life, fall halfway between by giving their character no personality, but instead having the characters talk to you as if you were that character.

Additionally, in Aesop's fables or other (generally sci-fi or fantasy) stories, characters are often referred to physically (tortoise, haire) or by title (The Engineer, The First Mate). Because there is an infinite combination of words, you can go an infinite number of words without any mention of the character having a name.

OPINION: My practice, because I prefer third-person, is to give my characters very contrasting names based on their roles in the story. When I write first-person stories, I tend to give the character a name anyways just for storyboarding purposes.