Going slightly meta, (I posted the question), I learned the significance of character names from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story, The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. It was one of the assigned short stories in my English class back in high school.

http://www.cardinalhayes.org/our...

In it the corpse of a handsome man washes up near a village, and the women fantasize about what he might have been like. Among the things they ponder is what his name might have been.

They were wandering through that maze of fantasy when the oldest woman, who as the oldest had looked upon the drowned man with more compassion than passion, sighed: 'He has the face of someone called Esteban.' It was true. Most of them had only to take another look at him to see that he could not have any other name. The more stubborn among them, who were the youngest, still lived for a few hours with the illusion that when they put his clothes on and he lay among the flowers in patent leather shoes his name might be Lautaro. But it was a vain illusion. There had not been enough canvas, the poorly cut and worse sewn pants were too tight, and the hidden strength of his heart popped the buttons on his shirt.

I didn't get it (none of us did) since we didn't have much context. Our teacher explained that Lautaro was a more modern name than Esteban, hence the younger women fantasizing about that name.

Anyway, so my candidate for a great name: Esteban in this story.

Some more candidates. I'll add more as I think of them.

1. I like the names Adam and Eve for characters who you want representing very fundamental archetypes.
2. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom from Updike's Rabbit series is very interesting. Not only does it fit well within the metaphor of the scooting rabbit, the last name Angstrom, which is also a very tiny unit of measurement, also suggests the insignificance of the main character (I don't know if this was intended).
3. Alliteration in Marvel superhero names (Bruce Banner, Peter Parker...) is interesting. The double names seem to suggest some sort of primal doubling of human capacity. Jean Valjean has some of the same characteristics.
4. Dostoyevsky's characters have morally significant names, I am told, like Raskalnikov, "The name Raskolnikov derives from the Russian raskolnik meaning "schismatic" (traditionally referring to a member of the Old Believer movement)."