Understanding character naming in Khaketla’s Mosali a Nkhola: a literary onomastic analysis

Abstract

This article aims to understand Khaketla’s intent in naming the characters in Mosali a Nkhola. As one of its key features, a novel has characters whose main purpose is to carry readers through the journey the author proposes for them. Characters, like people in real life, bear names that not only help identify them, but also play a vital role in the development of the theme in a literary text. The author makes assumptions about certain things and relies on them when selecting names for the characters. Through character naming, the author blends reality and artistic features to attain credibility. This, therefore, indicates that in literature, as in real-life contexts, names are not just tags, but they carry particular meanings. Using literary onomastics as an analytical tool, the article explores the names of the characters in Mosali a Nkhola to find out their meanings and significance in the development of the theme of the novel. The findings reveal Khaketla’s creative skill in naming in that the names are symbolic of Basotho history, culture and tradition. They also represent the traditional and modern philosophies, bringing out the concept of cultural dynamism in the text.