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CTGttW Question 3: Names and identity
Names, titles, and identity are the reucrrent theme in the book. Characters go by different names in different times and places . Marya is either Petrovna or Antonova; Suzuki is the Cartographer; the Professor is Artemis (and incidentally Gregori). Elena is the stowaway or an hallucination. The Captain never has a name, and the Crows' names seem irrelevant.
How much are people defined by their name or their role? Are they different people when they have different references (is Suzuki the same as the Cartographer? is Marya Petrovna the same as Marya Antonova?) How do the different names change how people relate to each other? How do different names change the characters themselves?
Comments
I actually found the lack of definition of names to be quite confusing. Weiwei, Elena, the Captain and the crow were memorable because of their roles. But to me the rest kind of blended together.
It's very Russian though
Is Marya to be considered the daughter of Petrov or Anton? And yes, in familial terms and her status in First Class I'm sure that it would indeed make a difference (though admittedly a difficult one for some of us readers to divine).
I kind of like the way identities shift between personal names and roles / ranks, as (for me at least) it focuses your attention on what matters about the person at this stage. Is Suzuki acting in a particular scene as a man who wants to get to know Marya better, or as a functional role within the train?
I found it interesting too that Weiwei really wanted to know that the stowaway had a name (and a Russian one at that, rather than a Chinese one) - it made her more of an individual than just constantly thinking about "the stowaway". And the name kept on being used even when Weiwei and all us readers knew she wasn't a Russian at all in the conventional sense.
PS the name Elena means "shining light" so is particularly suited to some of her later actions and how she comes to be perceived.
Yes - I was thinking about the author choosing the name rather than the characters. Does Sarah Brooks do this consistently? I'm not sure and haven't yet checked it out. Apparently Weiwei is a unisex name, meaning "gentle" or "soft" in Mandarin - not sure that this one fits?
I didn't really see this as a theme. For me a theme needs to be worked and varied, and I don't think this book did this. However I have given it only one reading.
First, I think this is an artifact of the 1st person narrative. Once a name is assigned, it is maintained by the author to make sure that consistency is maintained. I can see this book being written on index cards that are moved around a board, and that need to be kept harmonised.
Second, the idea that we have a stable identity that is coded into our true name is quite recent, so the idea that the person changes when their name is changes is, to be frank, odd. As if a whole person could be contained in one name.
@RichardAbbott Sarah Brooks seems to have published 5 or six short stories, a couple of initial workings of this story, and this novel. https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?197668 So a developing rather than mature author.
Also I said something about the name Weiwei in an earlier post. Like many things here, it's left undeveloped, or maybe underdeveloped.
@NeilNjae In another question you mention class. It is clear that in this book, the only people who matter are those who have names, who thus are1st class, and the rest are named only to demonstrate that they are of use to the 1st class. The Countess and her maid are an example of this function, Namelessness and 3rd class is just an echo. Likewise the 3rd class and crew are contrasted as those who provide something to the 1st class, and those who don't. That's it. The Engineer matters only in how he provides for the scientist, and how he fails Weiwei. Likewise the Cartographer for Marya. Pretty thin stuff.
Of course there's a fun double meaning here - we use "name" to not only mean a tag for a person, but also to mean "reputation". There's a Father Brown story (I forget which) where the plot turns on one character saying something like "of course he has no name", and most people hear the tag definition, whereas the speaker in fact meant the reputation / status definition.
A similar double meaning is train - it's a vehicle, to be sure, but also a regimen for improvement.
I have a suspicion that we might find a lot more of those double meaning words if we looked for them.
But do our perceptions of people change when their name (or the name we use) changes? Do we think about Suzuki differently from the Cartographer? Do we think about the Professor differently from Artemis? When is their role more important than their individuality?
Agreed. The book could have said something interesting about class and the power relations that come from it, and didn't.
Isn't that perhaps because neither first not third class passengers had any power? Both were entirely dependent on the train and crew to get them to the other side, and the first class lot didn't appear to have authority over the thirds to get them to do menial tasks or whatever. Maybe the point was that these apparent class memberships were in fact irrelevant in the face of the Wastelands?
Going back to my "meaning of names" theory, Artemis is a fascinating one as a pseudonym for the Professor - the original Artemis was female, a hunter, a virgin, a protector through childbirth, and was a goddess associated with the wilderness - all things which are peculiarly appropriate to the Professor as well as superficially completely unsuited to him.
So maybe in response to "How do different names change the characters themselves?" one could say that the different names and titles are pulling out different strata of the individuals concerned
The Third Class passengers were still passengers, not servants working their passage. And all passengers were subservient to the crew on the train.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. It's a steam-era train, so of course it will have different classes of passengers. And it's steam-era train to make it the only fast route across the continent. Any earlier, there would have been no trains; any later, people would fly.
Would the book have worked as well on a liner crossing an ocean?
A fun occupation to do while not reading?