I know the narrator's name

Ok, to start, sorry about the clickbait. It’s only a little true.

The narrator’s name is, for a solid section of the book, boo’ful. Please don’t click away! This may seem kinda strange, but let me explain. I was looking over chapter 24 in class before we started our in-class reading day, and when I was flipping through the book looking for the page, I was skimming pages for the word “boo’ful” as I was trying to find the scene where the narrator is uptown with Sybil. After finally finding the passage, I thought for an instant that it was weird that I had looked for boo’ful in the same way that I had been scanning this book for names like Jack and Norton when I was looking for a specific scene. Thinking about it, the narrator is addressed exclusively by the word boo’ful for about ten pages. Boo’ful is used as a subject, not an adjective throughout the scene with Sybil, and we know who Sybil is talking about when she says “boo’ful”. So then I got to thinking if I was treating boo’ful as a name, and Sybil was treating boo’ful as a name, and the narrator was responding to boo’ful as a name, what made it not a name?

Intuitively, the readers don’t think boo’ful is a name, we don’t even stop to consider it as a potential name, but why is that? For one, we think of a name as a special type of word, used (usually) exclusively to describe people. When we think of names we think of John or Carrie or even something more exotic like Saskia or Isidore, not “boo’ful”. But there is nothing really inherent about a set of sounds that for some reason is allowed to represent a person, as opposed to other sets of sounds that aren’t. In actuality, I think that why readers are so averse to saying his name is “boo’ful” is because he doesn’t ever actually recognize it as such. I think we place a lot of value in what people want to be called, and even if Sybil is calling him boo’ful, we don't, because he is clearly uncomfortable with the title. He doesn’t call himself boo’ful, or anything close to it. In addition, as readers we recognize that calling him boo’ful and reducing him to this fetish-y adjective is racist and degrading, and so we don’t want to think of it as a name.

Names have been such an important and pointed omission from the flow of the novel, probably because of how tied names are to identity, and the fact that throughout the novel, the narrator is trying to find his. The fact that the narrator doesn’t use any name at all is incredibly powerful – it separates him from the imposed opinion of the readers, and so he is completely in control of his identity. But at the same time, by not having a name, he seems to not have an identity at all. It’s sometimes hard to think of the narrator as a real person, seeing as we don’t get any physical description of him, not to mention his name. I think it’s significant that Sybil gives him a sort of name, thus affirming some sort of identity both to herself and to us.

What do you think? Is boo’ful the narrator’s name, or is this just a technicality?