3. No Name?

[John]

3. Why does Bernanos not give the priest, who narrates the novel, a name? What significance does this have?

[Manuel]

This is a typical author game when the novel is written in the first person by a narrator. I myself have used it in two of my novels, although in both I mentioned the name of the narrator, beyond one half of the novel is past, by making another character name him.

Bernanos may have done it because he wants his narrator to represent a whole category of young priests, and giving him a name would have made this more difficult to detect.

We found a more extreme case in our reading of The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera, where not the narrator, but another character (the Man in the Wing Chair) is left anonymous during the whole novel.