Writing Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for the craft of professional writing, including fiction, non-fiction, technical, scholarly, and commercial writing. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
My research paper focuses on a novel with a nameless protagonist, so I'll be referring to him a lot. Is there some convention for referring to such characters in academic papers? For context, the novel is The Wings by Yi Sang, and here's an example sentence I'd like to be able to write:
Many of these sentiments are channeled through [nameless protagonist].
There isn't really a single conventional word that is used, I believe.
Protagonist might work, but it's pretty dry. I'd say in this case, for this story, it might be better to use a more descriptive word, or combination of words that identify the man more directly.
Start by looking at the character's relationships with the other characters in the story - especially the antagonist, his wife. If she's his wife, then he must be her husband. So he is the husband.
But the main character is also a willfully pathetic victim. When I read the story I just want to shake him and say, "Wake up!" (Which I think is maybe the point of the story.)
Calling him one thing over and over, will start to get awfully repetitive, and if writers have one convention, it's that they don't want to be boring. You might pick a couple of characteristics about the man out of the story and rotate through them, using all of them to identify him.
I think it's pretty common to refer to the main character in a story as "the hero" or "the main character", or, as you say, "the protagonist". If the writer doesn't give him a name, you could use one of these terms. Or shift between them for variety.
As @DoWhileNot suggests, if you can give the character a brief description, use that. Like, "the husband", "the traveler", "the soldier", etc.
Some writers give him a letter. I've read papers that say things like, "The character is not given a name in the story, so I shall refer to him as 'M'". I've seen one-letter names that stand for something relevant, like "B" for the man from Britain. Or simply X.
