In one of my earliest attempts at a novel – this would have been around 1997 – the hero was named Zack Freebody. I don’t recall the proposed storyline, only that it was inspired by Rage Against the Machine, one of my favourite bands at the time, and involved some sort of rebellion. It was a mile marker in my development as a writer, because it contained my first attempt at a symbolic character name.
‘Freebody’, of course, was an allusion to the protagonist’s struggle for freedom against whatever oppression I was cooking up. (It never eventuated – the ‘novel’ died around page 20 or 30.) Zack was my own little in-joke, Zack de la Rocha being the vocalist for RATM.
When I thought about this many years later, I realised I should have called him Freeman – i.e. a real name, and one that doesn’t shout, “Hey! I’m a creative writing undergraduate trying to be literary!”
As with setting, a character’s name can be incidental or used to add richness to a story. Either is fine, but if the author chooses an ironic name he needs to have a clear reason for doing so and not be too ostentatious about it.
Charles Dickens invented outlandish names for his characters and, while a certain type of critic has ridiculed him for it ever since, the names were memorable and became one of his trademarks. Monikers such as Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dick Swiveller, Augustus Snodgrass, Josiah Bounderby, and Prince Turveydrop are unmistakably ‘Dickensian’. Many of them are also ironic or describe the character – Josiah Bounderby, for instance, proves to be a fraud or a ‘bounder’, British slang for a dishonourable man.
Perhaps the most famous example of a symbolic name is Joe Christmas, the protagonist in Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), who has similarities with Jesus Christ and therefore shares his initials. Stephen King cribbed the idea for John Coffey, his own Christ-like character in The Green Mile (1995).
It’s a practise I’ve only bothered with if a clever name presents itself or if it helps define a character. Ray ‘Bundy’ McLaughlin in ‘Modifications’ is a drunk, so his nickname comes from a brand of Australian rum (Bundaberg). As I discussed in another blog post, the characters in ‘Test Case’ were an homage to the TV characters that inspired them. And when I altered the protagonists in ‘Unreal Estate’ to make them more likable, I also changed their names to better reflect their personalities.
The one time I went all out in this regard was with a fantasy story called ‘Displeasures of the Flesh’. It worked because fantasy character names are often nonsense anyway, so readers never batted an eyelid at Salashus (salacious), Concervio (conservative), Mediatés (mediates), Virgus (virgin) etc.
Coming up with a good name can be a joyous thing, and add a dash of spice to your story, but cogitating on it too long is both pointless and liable to produce contrived results. A name is, after all, just one building block of characterisation, and the hoi polloi reader probably won’t notice your literary wink anyhow.
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