: How to deal with nameless characters? In the novel I'm planning the human characters that inhabit the world are all clones of each other. Man and woman. They aren't given names when born, instead

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People will name themselves and one another. It seems to be more or less hardcoded into our DNA. Once you have a concept of yourself, you have a concept of something other than you, and the need for a label to distinguish the two emerges.

You could do worse than to check out the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which among other things spends quite a bit of time with groups of characters who are all physically identical, and formally known only by their ID numbers. They develop individual personalities, decorate their armour to distinguish themselves from one another, decorate themselves with tattoos and hairstyles, and they adopt nicknames - either chosen by themselves, or by their 'brothers'.

These nicknames often come from elements of the clone's personality or experiences. For example:

CT-5555 is known as "Fives"
"Heavy" prefers heavy weaponry
"Echo" tends to repeat orders for everyone
"Dogma" believes what his superiors tell him, and toes the party line
"Chatter" was a comms tech
"Fixer" was a tech specialist

etc...

Your clones would likely be in a similar situation - If there's an easy pattern in a person's number, that might be referenced. If they show a particular interest or aptitude in some sphere of endeavour, that would give them a name. Some unusual experience could be referenced ("Crock" if someone once stepped on an alligator, for example).

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If they have numbers, then the number is effectively a name. But human beings have a hard time remembering numbers. If your characters refer to each other as 1892463, 1984236, 3894361, and 4896324, the reader is going to have a hard time keeping track of them.

If it's hard to keep track in a story, that's probably because it would be hard to keep track in real life. Rather than ask, "How can I make this work in my story?", try asking, "How would this work in real life?" If your world was real, how would people refer to each other? If you can come up with something that would plausibly work in real life, it will probably work in the story.

I'd guess that in real life, people would give each other names of some sort. If not what we think of as names, they might call each other by job titles or relationships or physical descriptions. Just like we do today. ("Sarge", "Mom", "Shorty", etc.)

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Your characters may not have names, but they have to have some identifiers.

Other examples in fiction:

Star Trek's Borg use designations which specify where each drone (individual) is in the hierarchy of its group, and where that group
is attached to. Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 01
means that this drone is the third most important (9 of 9 is the
most) but her specific task is teritary to the lead drone (so not
super critical), and her group is attached to a specific location
(Unimatrix 01, the center of Borg "society").
Larry Niven's Kzinti
are addressed by their family relationships and then jobs and have to
earn a name.
In Ayn Rand's novella Anthem,
individuals are called by a combination of a word plus a number, and
are raised in collective groups. Each individual refers to him- or
herself with plural pronouns.
In Ira Levin's This Perfect Day, people are using fewer and fewer
names; there are something like four names for men and four for women
when the story starts. The protagonist's actual name is a string of
characters, but his nickname is "Chip."
I haven't read it, but in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale,
the protagonist is "Offred," meaning of Fred, belonging to Fred. Handmaidens are all given designations like this.
In The Bees by Laline Paull, the characters (all actual bees) are
from various groups named after flowers and then given a number; the
protagonist is Flora 717.
In The Force Awakens, we learn that stormtroopers are stolen from
their families as children and raised in groups, and given only
numerical designations. John Boyega's character originally had the
designation FN-2187; it's Poe Dameron who later gives him the name
Finn.

People will come up with ways to address one another. You as the author need to figure out how to delineate your characters so the reader can distinguish them. Nicknames, shortened versions of lengthy alphanumeric strings, epithets like The Gunslinger, The Doctor, the man with the thistledown hair — just be consistent in how you address each individual, and you'll be fine.

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