Several reasons suggest themselves for Cormac McCarthy’s
decision not to give names to the characters in his novel The
Road. Among those reasons are the
following:
- Leaving the characters unnamed adds
to the eerie, creepy mystery of the book. Just as we have no idea exactly what kind of
disaster has descended on the people of this book, so we have no idea of the precise
names of the characters affected by the disaster. Giving the characters names might have
helped make the disaster seem somehow explicable. Instead, McCarthy intrigues and
disturbs us by creating massive uncertainty. - Use of
unnamed characters is immediately intriguing and provokes immediate questions, as in the
very first sentence of the book:
When he woke in the woods in the dark of the
night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside
him.
- Leaving the
characters unnamed makes them more “archetypal.” That is, they seem to be
representatives of human beings in general rather than merely specific, identifiable,
particular human beings. The father and son, especially, symbolize the relationship
between any father and any son, or between any loving parent and beloved
child. - Ironically, the use of characters who are not
precisely identified makes it possible for readers to identify and empathize with them
(at least with the father and son). We can relate to them more easily partly because
they could be any two people rather than two people in
particular. - The other characters, also unnamed, are often
frightening, and partly they are frightening because they, too, represent archetypal
traits (such as “the predator,” “the potential killer,” etc.). In the same way that
Flannery O’Connor’s famous character The Misfit would seem less ominously threatening if
he were named Irving Kasnoznich, so the unnamed hunter whom the father kills in order to
protect himself and his son is more disturbing as an unnamed hunter than if he were
Frank Kowalski. :-)
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