The (un)Named Fates

As an author, there is always a certain joy to picking the names out for characters.  Does it have significance?  Did you know someone with that name who is a bit like the character?  Is it a blase name for a blase character?  Or a blase name for an exuberant character?

When you name a pair of brothers Booth and Lincoln... there's clearly something going on.  When the Lincoln character has a job playing Abe Lincoln in a museum in which he gets "assassinated" by any paying tourist, there is clearly something going on.  When the Booth character carries a gun wherever he goes, there is clearly something going on.

So what's going on?  Witty banter, for sure - on the level of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at least.  What else?  Clever pauses, scripted in for all to see.  Instead of writing stage directions that say "long pause", Parks (the author) simply writes in the characters names.  If it's a long pause between characters, she sometimes writes:

Booth
Lincoln
Booth
Lincoln

It gives the reader that beautiful opportunity, so often absent in screenplays, so often present in fiction, to imagine the body language of the characters.  Uniquely, it is presented as an exchange of lines that aren't there, lines that become frowns, stinkeyes, grins and winks.

So it's clever, yes.  Witty, too.  Lucky for the reader, it also has a solid plot line that builds to exactly where it shouldn't but has to and isn't that just the way of fate sometimes.