“The Woman in the Dunes” by Kobo Abe (post 3): Namelessness, not a literary technique, is a Multiple Personality Idiosyncrasy

As you see in the previous post: While the regular narrative of this novel has characters, including the protagonist, who are nameless, the protagonist, behind the scenes, really does have a name, and the author does not care if the reader knows it.

What are the lessons to be learned about how novels are written?

First, namelessness of characters in a story is not a literary technique to give the story mystery, universality, or whatever. If the author had been using namelessness for its effect on the reader, he wouldn’t have named the protagonist in a conversation between the narrator and protagonist, and made that conversation available to the reader.

Second, the reason for namelessness is evidently a private matter, understood by the various personalities involved in the writing. Presumably, the narrator, who knows the name of the protagonist, has his own reasons for not using that name in the regular story, but this is not primarily related to its effect on the reader.

In short, namelessness, which literary criticism usually thinks is a literary technique, designed to affect the reader, actually has a private meaning, known only to the alternate personalities involved in the writing. It is a product of the author’s system of alternate personalities, and might be thought of as a multiple personality idiosyncrasy.