I find myself overlooking the nameless narrator more often than I notice it at first glance. As a nonfiction writer, I seldom sign my own name in the work; why would I? It’s already there, plain as day. It only becomes glaring when I finish a novel and try to search for a particular point online and realize I don’t know how to phrase the question. I’ve spent hundreds of pages with this figure. I may know their biological sex and the one they wish they possessed. More often than I’d like, I’m aware of their bodily habits, even their defecation patterns. I might know things about them that no one else in their life could possibly know, yet I don’t have the one thing about them that everyone expects to know. I’m at a loss for what to name them.
If you, like me, enjoy literature with minimal plot and a mood-driven ambiance, you’ve likely encountered narrators who go unnamed. In 2015, the phenomenon was pronounced enough for Sam Sacks to describe it as an “epidemic” in a New Yorker piece tracing its lineage. And the trend has persisted since. Nameless narrators appear in some of the most talked-about contemporary 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, this is just one branch of nameless narrators. The convention is also common in apocalyptic novels, where social structures that make naming meaningful have collapsed; in Christian allegory, where humanity as a whole is implicated; and in thrillers, where withholding a name can precipitate a twist. But I see those as distinct strands from the ones I keep encountering: narrators wandering through cities, isolated not by systemic collapse but by their own rumination. I enjoy these books, and I think brooding on a subway ride is cool and entertaining. I don’t reject nameless narration as a convention; I simply don’t know what it asks of me, or what it hopes I will notice.
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Names often function as stand-ins for identity, and the absence of a name can perform the same job. In Rebecca, one of literature’s best-known instances, the second Mrs. de Winter remains unnamed, and her lack of a fixed self becomes the novel’s central wound. She imagines herself mostly as a stand-in for the former mistress, Rebecca—a woman whose name and agency are so overpowering that she titles the book. Audition likewise probes the fragility of self, told by an unnamed actor who seems to inhabit two consciousnesses at once: “Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural overlay of one mind atop another.”
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 prevalent interpretation is that anonymity functions as a vessel into which the reader can step—an idea sometimes linked to Everyman, the Christian allegory, and, more recently, to Everyman, the Philip Roth novella. Yet I’m skeptical about how well that actually works. For me, 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 recall a friend who confessed he finds fiction challenging because he gets stuck deciding on names. Once you pick one, he argued, you implicitly tether all sorts of other attributes: age, ethnicity, gender. Our other friends teased him: surely he’d have to know something about his own characters. Did he expect to craft a person outside of time, without race, background, or gender, and expect that would still resonate? This is the paradox: withholding specificity creates vagueness, while universal themes require precise detail. If anything, a withheld name collapses the distance between narrator and author—more than between narrator and reader. When a text veers toward autofiction, the name often serves as a dial the author uses to indicate how autobiographical the alignment between figure and writer should feel.
But perhaps I’m wandering off topic. Maybe I’ve been distracted by the mechanics of how namelessness reconfigures the narrator’s sense of self and forgotten to consider the other half of the matter.
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Here’s a crucial point: these nameless narrators do, in fact, possess names.
Take the Rebecca narrator, for instance—the book tells us her name is “lovely and unusual.” Maxim is aware of it. The Kers at Manderley know it. It’s only the reader who remains in the dark, unable to view the narrator through the eyes of others. A name is, after all, the simplest way someone can be made present to another person.
Thus the withholding of a name marks a shift in narrative stance as much as it signals identity. It isn’t that the character stands for “everyone” or “no one,” nor even that they are “the author,” but rather that their external form is not disclosed to us. The narrative perspective feels like a camera mounted to the narrator’s chest.
It’s probably worth noting that I began a sequence of contemporary nameless-narrator novels immediately after finishing Mrs Dalloway, followed by a spree of podcasts about modernism.
Mrs Dalloway stands as a quintessential modernist work in many respects, using free indirect discourse to approximate the flux of thought. Yet before modernism arrived, realism in the nineteenth century was the dominant mode. Those novels were told by an all-seeing narrator who observed characters from a godlike vantage point. A stable intellect surveyed a universe that could, in principle, be fully grasped. But secularization, mechanization, and the traumas of World War I unsettled those assumptions. Freud was elevating the subconscious and interior realities. An objective, God-like view no longer seemed right, so modernism shifted inward, focusing the novel through the lens of the individual. Gradually, the camera moved inside the character.
All of this—modernism, naming, and the visual scope of storytelling—was weighing on me when I began reading Transcription, and I felt it everywhere. The unnamed narrator’s 90-year-old mentor hints that the self is in part formed when it is seen by another: “Did you know all melanin is brown?” the mentor asks, “It is the way light hits the iris, the way it is reflected to the eyes of others, that gives color.” If a name is the instrument for conceiving the other, erasing it blocks that external vantage point. If the narrator’s eyes were blue, they would never read as blue to 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 invites readers inside consciousness, the nameless narrator extends that project by denying any safe exit from the interior. Conveniently, my next book, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, is a novel in which an unnamed narrator investigates the modernist pioneer Gertrude Stein. When the narrator writes about Stein, the impulse to escape the gaze of others seems central 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 Johns Hopkins professor, by her brother, to undo the manner of the nineteenth century.” What quicker route to shed a self that someone else chose for you than by shedding a name?
Yet today’s writers aren’t twentieth-century modernists. In My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Levy contends with the limits of describing a new era with a vocabulary inherited from a prior century: “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 evolving era, the “epidemic” of namelessness is a product of this one.
What about our world drives novelists to adopt this mode? Transcription is largely a meditation on how technology structures experience—even when it’s quiet. And there is something to that observation—the way smartphones and social media make us aware of the gap between the self we experience inwardly and the self others perceive. There’s also the fact that, as work and daily life drift toward privatization, the self becomes something we define in private. I’ve seen a million cat memes shouting “PLEASE DO NOT PERCEIVE ME!!!” It does seem that the question—are we looking or are we being looked at?—has grown precariously charged just as our narrators are losing their names.
The nameless narrator, by nature, remains enigmatic and resistant to complete exposure. Yet I know what happens when I read them, or rather, when I realize after finishing that I never knew their name: my gaze drifts away from the page, and the boundaries of the narrative rise into view. I become more conscious of what has been withheld, of the inevitability that something will always stay out of reach for me.
