Robert Cohen: Emblem, Essence, Naming and its Discontents (July 2006)

Fiction writer Robert Cohen explores, as he puts it, the “dark, forbidding, all but impenetrable jungle” of naming characters in fiction.  Arguing that a character’s name should strike the reader as inevitable, and preferably not allegorical, Cohen looks at a range of ways that authors approach the task of naming, from the satirical to the emblematic.  Cohen gives emphasis to Melville’s Moby Dick and Nabokov’s Lolita, but draws, too, on examples from John Kennedy Toole, Norman Mailer, and Henry James.