The Writers' Coffeehouse Forum Looking for your opinions on a..

Hello! A quick introduction- my name is Mitchell, and I am new here!

Alright, now that that's out of the way...

I've had this idea floating around my head for a while now and I want to get your opinion on it. While brainstorming ideas for the protagonist of a new project I'm working on, I thought it might be interesting to reveal no backstory for my character. More specifically, I thought of introducing my character washed up on shore, naked, with a good old case of retrograde amnesia. No clues whatsoever about who he is or where he came from.

The setting for this story is going to be in a completely fictional world, so having this character conveniently placed into it with no evidence as to where they came from could prove to be an entertaining way of getting the reader to feel like THEY could be the character. The reader could easily imagine being in a shipwreck, a car accident, a coma, or simply falling asleep, only to find themselves washed up naked, on the shores of a mysterious land, with no memory of who they are or how they got there.

However, I'm also fearful that the opposite could become true- that by having an anonymous background, the reader might feel less inclined to relate to the character. Do you think that rather than view it as clever and intriguing, readers might feel it to be a cheap trick that cheats them of a well developed character?

I am torn. I've never come across an example of this in anything I've read, though I'm sure they exist. It is definitely something I want to experiment with, but I also don't want to invest too heavily in it only to find I've created a b*****d character that no one will ever appreciate.

Any opinions or criticisms are welcome!

My two cents? I think you won't really have a way to make the character someone people can connect with and care about without him having a background.