Name's the Same/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Before adding to this list, ask yourself whether it would make more sense to create a disambiguation page for same-named works instead. If you're adding same-named characters, please continue!

  • Agatha Christie's short story "The Rajah's Emerald" featured a mild-mannered clerk called "James Bond".
  • Place example: Katherine Patterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia asserts she "just made up" the name of the kids' imaginary world, but she also acknowledges she did read CS Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia growing up and thinks maybe she was subconsciously thinking of the island from the books, Terabinthia.
  • The children's book Blubber stars a girl named Jill Brenner. Jill Brenner is also the name of the protagonist of Nothing Human, in which she's targeted by a psychopath who tortures and mutilates his victims as on offering to a Mayan god. Oh, and her boyfriend committed suicide just before the book's beginning.
  • Stephen King's Desperation has a main protagonist named Peter Jackson, similar to that one director of Meet the Feebles, Bad Taste, Brain Dead and a few more obscure films. Desperation also has many same named characters as those in Richard Bachman's The Regulators, but of course there is more to that than one might think...
    • Peter Jackson is also the name of a cigarette company.
    • And a character in Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain.
  • Michael Crichton named the retired L.A. police captain / mentor figure from his novel Rising Sun John Connor. Given the number of cyborgs Skynet dispatched to the Los Angeles of that era, and their M.O. of searching for their targets in the phone book, a meeting would have been inevitable.
  • There is a popular series of urban fantasy novels by Patricia Briggs whose protagonist is named Mercedes "Mercy" Thompson. There is another slightly less well-known but still successful series of urban fantasy novels by Toni Andrews whose protagonist is named Mercedes "Mercy" Hollings, and every novel in Andrews's series features the word "Mercy" as part of the title.
  • Aside from involving interstellar travel, Andre Norton's Star Born and George Zebrowski's Omega Point Trilogy have only one thing in common that I know of: in each, one of the heroes is named Raf Kurbi.
  • J. K. Rowling confirmed in an interview that, yes, she named Filch's cat Mrs. Norris after the Complete Monster Mrs. Norris from Mansfield Park. This would seem to require in-universe that Filch is a Jane Austen fan...
    • Probably unintentional, but Hufflepuff Zacharias Smith should not be confused with a more lovable dirty coward, who both older and a Doctor. Doctor Zachary Smith.

"Hey, weren't you in that show with the Robot?"

    • It's got to be a coincidence, but the murderer in the 1933 Ellery Queen short story "The Adventure of the Seven Black Cats" is named Harry Potter. His name is, in fact, the last two words of the story.
  • The Doctor Who Expanded Universe Eighth Doctor Adventures feature a character named Trix MacMillan. Sound familiar? It's almost exactly the same as the real name of Trillian from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Tricia McMillan. It's especially interesting as both series are British scifi and somewhere on the sillier side of the Sliding Scale of Silliness Versus Seriousness. As Trix MacMillan is merely an alias, this may in fact be a case of Character Name Alias, although this is never brought up by anybody.
  • Little Monsters. The short-lived franchise featuring a bunch of underaged miscreants created by Danger Mouse creator Tony Garth should not be mistaken for a franchise that features literal monsters that's created by long-time kids books author Mercer Mayer. The former was only popular in the UK and parts of Europe while the latter was only popular in North America tho.
  • This is the basis for the book The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates. From Amazon: "In 2000, Wes Moore had recently been named a Rhodes Scholar in his final year of college at Johns Hopkins University when he read a newspaper article about another Wes Moore who was on his way to prison. It turned out that the two of them had much in common, both young black men raised in inner-city neighborhoods by single mothers. Stunned by the similarities in their names and backgrounds and the differences in their ultimate fates, the author eventually contacted the other Wes Moore and began a long relationship."
  • John Steakley's novels Armor and Vampire$ both feature characters named Felix and Jack Crow. Vampire$ features the caveat "This Jack Crow is no other Jack Crow; this Felix is no other Felix" on the copyright page.
  • Madeline L'Engle's book A Wrinkle in Time uses the name Megatron...several years before the G1 Cartoon came out.
  • In Wuthering Heights, one character mentions being amused by another, less educated character's attempts to "read Chevy Chase". A Shout-Out to a 1980s comedian would be rather out-of-place in Wuthering Heights even if it weren't written ninety-six years before he was born, but it turns out that it's a reference to The Ballad of Chevy Chase.
  • The older-children's book Follow My Leader is about a boy who becomes blind and learns how to work with a seeing-eye dog. The boy's name? Jimmy Carter. (The book was published decades before James Earl Carter became President of the United States.)
  • There are two High Fantasy series titled "Inheritance." One is a Cliché Storm about a Canon Stu Dragon Rider with a flourishing Hatedom. The other is a complex and critically-acclaimed story about the interactions of gods and mortals.
  • A Gothic heroine named Isabella? Do you mean the heroine of Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure, the heroine of the "first" Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, the girl who falls for the villain and lives just long enough to regret it in the Gothic novel Wuthering Heights, or the Wuthering Heights fangirl who falls for a vampire in Twilight?
  • Don't confuse the respectable Twilight, a Holocaust novel by Elie Wiesel, with the not-so-respectable Twilight, a book about vampires who for some reason sparkle.
  • The Dr. Seuss book Scrambled Eggs Super featured a fictional species of bird called a Grinch.
  • Both Harry Turtledove and Newt Gingrich have written (or co-authored) an Alternate History novel titled Days of Infamy about Japan pursuing a different path after Pearl Harbor.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire has Davos Seaworth, who is nicknamed "The Onion Knight" because he gained his noble status by supplying a castle with foodstuffs during a siege. The Final Fantasy JRPG series has a weak job class called "Onion Knight", named so because in Japanese culture, onions are often used as a symbol of inexperience.
  • In the frame story of Who Cut the Cheese? by Mason Brown, Cisco Systems' stock (CSCO) outperforms that of Sysco (SYY), and Lewis passes the blame for a miscommunication about which stock to buy to his boss.
Back to Name's the Same
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Name%27s_the_Same/Literature?oldid=1747236"