Names in AtD - Frank

[Bekah]

I think MC answered his own question -   "…. then there is Frank, a very common name."     Frank is just a totally common name back then - and he was the common guy amongst the western Traverses and  Fresnos and Kindreds.  He didn't go east like Kit or become a card-shark like Reef.    Frank is the one who has a goodly chunk of the Western episodes - the cowboy good-guy who avenges Webb's death and sticks around the southwest from Denver to central Mexico.  

Bekah 
who feels a reread coming on -  (LOVE that book)

On May 6, 2013, at 2:58 AM, Ruth Flatscher <ruflatsch at gmail.com> wrote:

> well, Frank actually does have a very literal meaning, too... at least in English. 
> Haven't got around AtD yet, so I don't know whether it fits the character or has a rather sarcastic effect.
> cheers,
> R
> 
> ps - btw, PKDick also has a protagonist named Frank in "The Man in the High Castle"...
> 
> 
> On 6 May 2013 11:50, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es> wrote:
> We know that the names that TP uses are anything but inconsequential, they point to something if only we take the time to think about what. In AtD most of the Traverses have names that are less than common and would seem to have some greater value than a mere label for a character (Webb, Lake, Reef, etc) but then there is Frank, a very common name. Why?
> 
> I can't claim to have THE answer but I have an idea. First, we know that the book is composed in large part by drawing on a wide range of genres (what have been deemed "narrative clusters") and that these literary echoes are important for the book. Clearly one theme is the working class family and the social literature it belongs to.
> So I looked at Raymond Williams' Writing in Society, specifically The Ragged Arsed Philanthropists. It's about the novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, written by an Irishman and rejected by publishers for its ideological content, whose protagonist is named... you guessed it, Frank.
> 
> Does anybody want to add to this? Any other ideas for the name Frank?
> 
> 
> ciao
> mc otis
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Mag. Ruth Flatscher
> Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, University of Vienna
> Institute of Botany, University of Innsbruck