Often, I don’t notice it: the nameless narrator. Because I write nonfiction, I rarely include my own name. Why would I? It’s right there. It’s only when I finish a novel and try to Google a question that I realize I don’t know how to search it. I’ve spent hundreds of pages with this character. I might know what sex they have and what sex they wished they had. More often than I’d like, I know their defecation habits. I might know things about them that no one in their life knows, but I don’t know the one thing about them that everyone knows. I have no idea what to call them.
If you, like me, enjoy plot-light, vibe-heavy novels, you’ve probably spent a lot of time with unnamed narrators. In 2015, the phenomenon was widespread enough for Sam Sacks to label it an “epidemic” when he traced its history in the New Yorker. And it hasn’t slowed down in the years since. Nameless narrators show up in some of the most discussed literary fiction of the past few years: Audition by Katie Kitamura, Transcription by Ben Lerner, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy, and, most recently, Life of M by Rachel Cusk.
Of course, these only represent one species of nameless narrator. The convention is also popular in apocalypse novels, where social systems that make names useful have collapsed; in Christian allegory, where all of humanity is implicated; and in thrillers, where withholding a name can set up a plot twist. But I see these as separate lineages from the ones I keep running into: narrators wandering around a city, isolated not by the fall of society, but their own ruminations. To be clear, I enjoy these books, and I think brooding on the subway is cool and fun. I don’t mind the nameless narrator as a convention. I just don’t know what they want from me, or what they’re asking me to notice.
*
Names are often proxies for identity, and the same can be said for their absence. In Rebecca, one of the most famous examples, the second Mrs. de Winter is unnamed, and her lack of a fixed self is arguably the novel’s central wound. She imagines herself mostly as a replacement for the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca—a woman who, by contrast, has a name and agency so overwhelming that she titles the book. Audition, too, explores the instability of self, narrated by an unnamed actor who seems to experience two consciousnesses at once: “Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind.”
I don’t mind the nameless narrator as a convention. I just don’t know what they want from me, or what they’re asking me to notice.
One common reading is that anonymity serves as a vessel the reader can step into—an idea sometimes linked to Everyman, the Christian allegory, and, more recently, to Everyman, the Philip Roth novel. But I’m not sure how effective that is. For me, at least, it isn’t the presence or absence of a name that keeps me from identifying with the narrator of Fight Club, so much as the fact that I don’t want to be punched in the face.
I think of a friend who once said he struggles writing fiction because he always gets stuck on the names. As soon as you choose one, he said, you implicitly lock in all this other information: age, ethnicity, gender. Our other friends teased him about this: surely he’d have to know something about his own characters. Did he expect to write a person outside of time, with no race, background, or relationship to gender, and expect that to resonate with anyone? This is, of course, the paradox: leaving out specificity creates a sense of vagueness, while universality is built in detail. If anything, a withheld name collapses the distance between narrator and author—not narrator and reader. When a text is plausibly autofiction, the name often serves as a dial the author sets for how autobiographically we’re meant to identify the character with the writer.
But then maybe I’m getting off track. Maybe I’ve been distracted by the question of how namelessness reshapes the narrator’s identity, and forgotten the other half of it.
*
Here’s something that matters: these nameless narrators actually do have names.
The narrator of Rebecca, for example, has one that we’re told is “lovely and unusual.” Maxim knows it. The staff at Manderley know it. It’s only the reader who is left in the dark, unable to see the narrator through the eyes of another person. A name is, after all, the simplest way someone exists for others.
The withheld name, then, marks a shift in narrative position as much as it does identity. It’s not that the character is “everyone” or “no one,” or even “the author,” but that their external form isn’t revealed to us. The story is shot from a camera mounted on the narrator’s chest.
It’s probably relevant that I started reading a run of contemporary nameless-narrator novels right after I finished Mrs Dalloway, and then listened to a bunch of podcasts about modernism.
Mrs Dalloway is in many ways the quintessential modernist text, using free indirect discourse to approximate the movement of thought. But before modernism emerged, the nineteenth-century realist novel dominated. These books were told by an omniscient narrator who observed characters from the vantage point of God. It was a stable intelligence surveying a world that could, at least in theory, be comprehensively known. But secularization, industrialization, and the horror of World War I interrupted old ways of thought. Freud was stoking enthusiasm about the subconscious and interior realities. An objective God’s-eye-view no longer seemed quite right, and so, modernism’s inward turn began, and the novel’s world was filtered through the individual. More and more, the camera moved inside the character.
All this—modernism, names, the visual scope of a novel—was already on my mind when I started reading Transcription, and so I saw it everywhere. The unnamed narrator’s 90-year-old mentor gestures toward the possibility that the self is created, at least in part, when it’s seen by someone else: “Did you know all melanin is brown,” the mentor asks, “It is how the light strikes the iris, how it is reflected to the eyes of the other, that gives them color.” If a name is the tool by which we conceptualize the other, removing it obstructs that external vantage point. Should the narrator’s eyes be blue, they will never be blue for us.
It seems 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.
If the modernist novel lets readers inside consciousness, the unnamed narrator continues this project by refusing to let the reader step back outside of it. Conveniently, my next book, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, was a novel in which an unnamed narrator researches modernist pioneer Gertrude Stein. When the narrator writes about Stein, the desire to escape the vantage point of the others seemed core to Stein’s mission: “If we create ourselves with and through language, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein’s project was to dismantle herself and a whole century through language, 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 the self someone else chose for you than by shedding a name?
But today’s authors aren’t twentieth century modernists. In My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Levy writes about the limitations of trying to describe a new era with an older century’s vocabulary: “Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.” As Stein’s work was shaped by her own changing century, the nameless “epidemic” is borne of this one.
What is it about our world that inspires novelists to write this way? Transcription is largely a book about the way that technology “structures experience even when quiet.” And there’s something to be said about that—the way that smartphones and social media make us conscious of the distance between the person we experience ourselves as being and the person others see. There’s also the fact that as work and daily life become less communal, the self becomes something we define privately. I’ve seen a million cat memes screaming “PLEASE DO NOT PERCEIVE ME!!!” 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 unnamed narrator is inherently mysterious, resistant to being fully known. But I know what happens when I read them, or rather, when I realize after the fact that I never learned their name: my eye is drawn off the page, and the narrative walls become visible. I become more aware of what was held back, that there is always something held back from me.