Moll Flanders (Modern Library Classics)

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Why some of the characters do not have a name?

 

mylife m #170793
Feb 24, 2011 2:56 PM

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Why some of the characters do not have a name?

Why some of the characters do not have a name, for example, the character, robin, has a name although he does not have so influence in the life of Moll Flanders as his elder brother has?

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Elmora4life#179287
Apr 20, 2011 7:40 AM

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maybe because of the fact that Moll Flanders is written as an autobiography and the narrator which is Moll herself is a criminal and does not want to expose her partners in crime and about the others maybe because she does not want to make them infamous by being related to her or because if their names were known consequently by asking and searching her name would eventually be known.
But what is more confusing why the author did not use nicknames or unreal ones?
 

theocari l #192623
Jul 12, 2011 11:50 PM

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regarding the querry why Defoe did not use nicknames or unreal names, we may imagine that the author wanted his novel to create a landmark or breakthrough in the social literature in his time, and to achieve this end he gave real names to his characters. by the way, real names give more verisimilitude to fictional characters because they contribute to making them more creditworthy, that is they seem more like one of us, and so we can more easily understand the way they act or think.

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