The other day I was thinking of some of the wonderful names that Philip K. Dick gave to his characters:
Joe Chip
Glen Runciter
Bob Arctor
Palmer Eldritch
Perky Pat
And, of course, Horselover Fat.
My personal favorite names from these stories are Ragle Gumm from Time out of Joint, and Addison Doug, the main character in an obscure spaceship/time-travel story from 1974.
I feel like it shows a deep confidence to give your characters this sort of name. As names, they’re off, but at the same time they’re just right in context. “Addison Doug,” indeed.
Some authors are good at titles, some are good at last lines, some are good at names. So many books, even great books, have character names that are boring or too cute or just fine, but no more than just fine. To come up with these distinctive names is a high-risk ploy that, when it works, it adds something special to the whole story.
I always wondered by Nabokov chose “Humbert Humbert” as the name of his most famous character. That’s such a strange name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dickensian_characters
Before Dickens created the teacher Mr. M’Choakumchild, Walter Scott had Mr. Whackbairn
I still have some 35-cent Ace paperbacks, such as “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”, “Galactic Pot Healer”, and so forth. I didn’t identify well with most of his main characters but admired his imagination. He had a mental condition, described in his later semi-autobiographical books, which accounted for both effects, I think.
There’s a classic paper in metaphysics, by D.C. Williams, called “On the Elements of Being.” The paper is about the kinds of things that exist — particular things (like a lollipop), their parts (the sticks), their qualities (color, shape), etc. Anyways, Williams decides to name all these things. One lollipop is Heraplem; another is Boanerp. And he names their parts and qualities too, so you get these passages of incredibly dry analytic prose about the metaphysics of qualitative and numerical identity, but reading like this:
“Heraplem and Boanerp are partially similar, then, not merely because the respective gross parts Paraplete and Merrinel (their sticks) are wholly similar, but also because the respective fine parts, Hamis and Boreas (their “shapes”), are wholly similar. All this without prejudice to the fact that Hamis is numerically as distinct from Boreas, to which it is wholly similar, and from Harlac, with which it is conjoined in Heraplem, as Harlac is from Bantic to which it is neither similar nor conjoined, and as the stick Paraplete is from the stick Merrinel, and as the whole lollipop, Heraplem, is from the whole Boanerp.”
I’ve tried tracking down sources for these names and I haven’t been able to find anything. It looks like Williams just had a gift for silly names. I don’t know if I’d put Heraplem up against Horselover Fat, but I’ve never seen anything else quite like this in an academic context.
Horselover Fat is actually just Philip Dick translated to English. Which is important for plot reasons in the book.
This guy has nothing on Thomas Pynchon when it comes to naming characters
There is a book from the German artist Tommi Brem: “Appendix Dick” from 2016. It collects all names from all novels and short stories by Philip K. Dick, sorted by name, novel, year. An incredible work .. and work of art (with illustrations).
There is a link, it is to a German site, sorry: https://www.appendix-dick.com/
JC “dickkoepfigsammeln”
I never thought about character names can be used to make a story memorable. Characters like Peter Parker and Clark Kent are characters that almost everyone can recognize. Even just using names that are hardly even words seems to work as well- I think of Luffy D. Monkey from One Piece. In a genre of media that is dominated by Japanese names, the author just throws in “Luffy D. Monkey” and on top of that nearly every character in the manga has irregular names.
irregular names = memorable characters?