I don't know why you've directed me there. I think I inadvertently gave the impression that I'm not familiar with Felix the Cat. I am.
Let's consider for a moment king an official title, not a surname. If The Boy King means the king who is a boy, would The King Boy mean the boy who is a king?
No, it doesn't mean that. Apparently,
The King Boy means 'the boy whose name is King'. Right?
I mean King as a surname is meaningful.
You have a knack of getting to the most difficult questions. Does
King as a surname have a meaning? Philosophers have been debating this for decades. I think you could argue this, yes.
The author might suggest the boy is in some way like a king, but not in a literal sense: The King Boy = the boy who is (like) a king.
Yes, I presume that's exactly right, though I haven't read the book. Okay, now I see exactly what you mean. I would say that the writer of the book has deliberately played on the idea that names can have meaning.
I feel I should elaborate a bit on what I said earlier about
Felix the Cat not being a name of a cartoon character. My point really was to attempt to begin to untangle what I saw as certain points of confusion in your OP about what names are, and what they mean. Here's a little terminology that might help:
Felix [This is what is called in grammar a
proper noun. It consists of just one word and is used to identify a unique individual thing in the world. In philosophy, you can call this (problematically, in my view) a '
name'. One way to think about this is to ask whether you could use this word to alert the referent's attention. In other words, would it make sense to say "
Hey, Felix" to the cat himself? Yes, it would.]
the cat [This is what's called in grammar a
noun phrase. It's a syntactic unit which includes the word
cat, which is itself a
common noun. That means it refers to a
type of thing in the world. In that way, it should not be considered as a name.]
Felix the Cat [This is what's called in grammar a
proper name. It consists of a
proper noun (
Felix) and a
noun phrase (
the Cat) that includes a
common noun (
Cat). It is, in my view, a
different kind of name from
Felix, which can be understood differently. That is, you wouldn't say "
Hey, Felix the Cat" to try to get his attention. That shows it has a different kind of reference, and that's what I meant when I said
Felix the Cat is not the 'name' of the character, but of the comic. (Another way I could have put this was to say that
Felix the Cat is the name of the character/comic but
not the name of the cat itself, but I thought that was much too confusing.)]
