In popular conceptions of dystopia, names are often among the first things to disappear. The totalitarian futures of Ayn Rand's "Anthem" and Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" envision a citizenry known by numbers, like prisoners. Names vanish along with sight in José Saramago's "Blindness." They evidently have no function in the blasted post-apocalypse of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."
These are extreme cases, perhaps-barring Armageddons, you might expect people to know what they are called. But, in recent years, a curious number of novelists have declined to avail themselves of that basic prerogative: naming their creations. The first few months of 2015 alone have brought us the following books with nameless protagonists: Tom McCarthy's "Satin Island," Ben Metcalf's "Against the Country," Greg Baxter's "Munich Airport," Daniel Galera's "Blood-Drenched Beard," Deepti Kapoor's "A Bad Character," Paul Beatty's "The Sellout," Alejandro Zambra's "My Documents." Surely others have escaped my notice. It's an epidemic of namelessness.
