Starting from the working hypothesis that personal identity is central to any discussion of narrative identity, the first part of our study deals with the relationship between names seen as cultural universals and personal identity. In the second part, we shall restrain our area of interest to some naming practices in literature (more precisely, in George Eliot’s Silas Marner) and we shall finally focus upon three major trends in naming – pronominal reference, proper names and definite descriptions – with the definite purpose of indicating how names may contribute to defining personal identity in the narrative.
