In the film version of Rebecca the main character is also nameless. This is probably even easier to do in a film than in a book, because you can see who’s in the scene and who’s talking to whom so there’s less need to give everyone a name. However, it’s my recollection that the film version of The Witches gave the boy the name “Luke”. (Just checked the IMDb and this is correct.)
Sometimes a character who isn’t the first-person narrator will be known by a title or nickname rather than a proper name. In the Discworld series The Librarian is almost always called just The Librarian. He does have a real name, a fact which becomes a minor plot point in The Last Continent, but he’s keeping it a secret. This name is revealed in some of the supplementary books, but IIRC is never mentioned in the Discworld novels.
Death is also just Death, although for him that may count as a name as well as a title.
The main character in Fight Club is only listed as “The Narrator.” I just saw Lars Von Trier’s new film Anti-Christ, and neither of the two characters have names.
Well, he does have a proper name, it’s just never been revealed, so everyone just calls him The Doctor.
He’s named in the screenplay but Paul McGann’s character in Withnail & I has no name mentioned onscreen. Even in the end credits, his character is listed as ‘…& I’.
Cormac McCarthy often leaves his characters nameless, referring to them only as “the kid,” “the judge,” “the boy,” etc. Their descriptions are repeated consistently enough that the description seems to become the character’s name in the reader’s mind (in mine at least), but they’re still just descriptors.
Fistful of dollars is based on the Kurosawa film Yojimbo. The lead calls himself Kuwabatake Sanjuro (meaning “Mulberry Field thirty-year-old”) which he comes up with as he looks at a Mulberry Field. No one believes it is his real name.
The narrator/main character of The Handmaid’s Tale (and I’m referring to the novel, not the movie which I will NEVER see) is temporarily called Offred, and although she makes reference to having a real name, she never specifies what it is. However, she possibly manages to slip it in at one point, and I remember being so excited to make that discovery, especially since I was one of the few undergrads in that course. Of course, when I proudly made my announcement in class, it turned out that all the grad students already knew but hadn’t said anything in case any of we undergrads figured it out.
The narrator of Moby Dick. He does say, “Call me Ishmael,” but he is never referred to as such in the book and the sentence seems to imply you can call him that, but it’s not necessarily his name.
The narrator of “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and “The Man Who Lost the Sea,” though it’s probably easier to pull this off in a short story.
H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. The main character is referred to as “The Time Traveler.” The 1960 movie gave him a name of “H. George Wells,” though.
For anyone who hasn’t read the book, she is called Offred because her master is named Fred. All handmaids were referred to in this way – other handmaids the narrator knows are called Ofwarren and Ofglen.
The hero of John Carpenter’s They Live, played by ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper, has no name, although in the credits he’s listed as Nada.
Hmm, for some reason wikipedia IDs the character as George Nada.
Upon further research, according to the IMDB trivia page (for what that’s worth):
“Roddy Piper’s character never gives his name nor is he referred to by name throughout the entire movie. He is simply referred to as “Nada” in the credits, which means “nothing” in Spanish. The name is most likely a reference to George Nada, the main character of Ray Nelson’s short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” which was the basis for ‘They Live’.”