Namelessness: It is NOT an experimental, dystopian, or any other kind of literary technique. Then what is it, and what does it mean?

In every life circumstance from the best utopia to the worst dystopia, everyone has a specific designation, a name and/or number. People themselves like to have a name, to distinguish themselves from other people. People in power want everyone to have a name or number, so they can get everyone’s attention, tell them what to do, and keep track of them.

The only life circumstance with namelessness is multiple personality. Some alternate personalities don’t have a name.

For example, let’s say a person (the regular, host personality) is not a poet, is not interested in poetry, and never writes poems. But, unknown to them, they have an alternate personality who does write poems—usually at night, when the host personality assumes they have been sleeping—and that particular alternate personality does nothing else but write poems for their own private enjoyment. They keep the poems in a hiding place, and nobody else knows about either them or their poems. Why would such an alternate personality need a name? They don’t need a name, and they may not have one.

(This is a real life example, discovered when a person’s host personality had gone into a place in her apartment where she had not been in the habit of going, and found handwritten poems whose existence she couldn’t account for. In my interviewing her about these poems (without drugs or hypnosis), she switched to a nameless alternate personality, who knew all about the poems. When the person switched back to her regular personality, she had amnesia for my conversation with the poem-writing alternate personality.)

Namelessness does not, and would not, occur in any life situation other than multiple personality. So when you see it in fiction writing, it is usually not an intentional literary technique, but a manifestation of the fiction writer’s trait of multiple personality.

For further discussion of this recurring topic, search “namelessness” and “nameless.”