Joseph Prothro
Professor Jett
English B1a
16 November 2015
What’s in a Name in “The Harvey Pekar Name Story” Harvey Pekar’s “The Harvey Pekar Name Story” is a comic excerpt from the graphic novel American Splendor, also written by Pekar, which looks into the inner thoughts of a man contemplating his own name, “Harvey Pekar.” As the comic goes, Harvey’s monologue continues to go deeper into why do names matter. Pekar shows this when he writes, “It’s an unusual name – Harvey Pekar… ‘Harvey’ doesn’t really go with ‘Pekar’ — not in the conventional sense at least…” (261). In the end, Harvey comes to the unanswered thought “Who is Harvey Pekar?” (Pekar 264). This all leads to the question, why do we find names important to begin with? What are names? It seems like a simple enough question, but it is actually a very deep and meaningful one. Pekar writes Harvey Pekar in a situation where he thinks out, “What’s in a name? Who is Harvey Pekar?” (264). And in doing this, he brings up the question most people have thought to themselves at on point, “What does my name mean and how does that apply to me?” In the same way that people look into to their ancestry to find connections as to who they are, people do this for their own names as well. People look into the definitions of their names and what that might have to do with their personalities, and they look into how many people might share their name as well and what they might have in common with each other. In their book, A Comics Studies Reader, Kent Worcester and Jeet Heer write:
Here a man named “Harvey Pekar” (not to be confused with the author) addresses the reader... His concern? His name—which, though unusual, turns out not to be unique, as he discovers by looking through the phone book, where he finds not one but two other “Harvey Pekar” listings. The deaths of these two other Pekars (Harvey Sr. and Harvey Jr.,