The Perspective of This Blog: Interdisciplinarity.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/interdisciplinarity

Is it Credible That Charles Dickens or Mark Twain Had Multiple Personality: Is Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D., the Writer of This Blog, the World’s Foremost Authority on Anything?

I am certainly not the foremost authority on Dickens, Twain, or any of the other famous novelists I discuss. And if you are a Dickens or Twain scholar, or you are a professor of literature, creative writing, and literary theory, or you are a successful novelist, then you certainly know much more about these things than I do.

Nor am I the world’s foremost expert on multiple personality. In my general psychiatric practice, I have diagnosed and treated literally dozens of patients who had multiple personality. But there are some psychiatrists, who, having specialized in multiple personality, and having seen literally hundreds of such patients, know more about it than I do.

The question is: Do any of the authorities who know more than I do about either literature or multiple personality, know as much as I do about both?

Most literary experts, including those with psychoanalytical interests, have only superficial knowledge of multiple personality. And most psychiatrists—including the relatively few with expertise in multiple personality—have not studied literature or writers with regard to multiple personality.

So although I am not one of the foremost experts in either literature or multiple personality, I am one of the few people in the world who knows enough about both fields to see how one relates to the other.

Mark Twain Says That Characters Write Themselves (Just Like The Alternate Personalities in Multiple Personality)

In “Mark Twain Tells the Secrets of Novelists” (New York American, 26 May 1907), elaborating on what was quoted in the December 23, 2013 post, Twain said:

“Authors rarely write books. They conceive them, but the books write themselves. This is practically true of all characteristics intended to be portrayed…

“I never deliberately sat down and ‘created’ a character in my life. I begin to write incidents out of real life. One of the persons I write about begins to talk [in] this way and [another] one [talks in] another [way], and pretty soon I find that these creatures of the imagination have developed into characters, and have for me a distinct personality. These are not ‘made.’ They just grow naturally out of the subject. That was the way Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and other characters came to exist. I couldn’t to save my life deliberately sit down and plan out a character according to a diagram. In fact, every book I ever wrote just wrote itself. I am really too lazy to sit down and plan and fret to ‘create’ a ‘character.’ If anybody wants any character ‘creating,’ they will have to go somewhere else for it.”

As noted in my post of August 21, 2013, “Where I’m Coming From,” this is the kind of thing, in interviews of recent novelists, that led me to research Dickens and start this blog.

What Twain and other novelists describe about how they get their characters is basically the same way that people with multiple personality get their alternate personalities: They do not deliberately and methodically create them. But out of some pressing need, and based on a known or imagined kind of person, the seemingly autonomous personalities, like Twain’s seemingly autonomous characters, magically materialize.

When Twain and other novelists tell us about this in interviews, hardly anyone really listens, including the interviewers. Of the many interviews that I have read and seen in which novelists confided such things, I have never known any interviewer to seriously pursue it.

William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience Concludes that Experience of the Presence of God is Mediated by Normal Multiple Personality

Published in 1902 and in print ever since, William James’s book is an enduring classic. But very few readers understand what James concluded, because they read his book from religious or philosophical interests, and they do not fully take into account that James was a psychologist of his time and that the subtitle of his book is A Study in Human Nature.

What was going on in the study of human nature in James’s time? In psychiatry, there was Pierre Janet’s report of patients with multiple personality. In psychology, people were excited about dissociative phenomena like automatic writing, which indicated that normal people had co-conscious or subconscious, secondary selves, of which the primary self was unaware.

(This was usually thought of as double, or dual, consciousness, rather than multiple consciousness, because of the popular book published by A. L. Wigan, M.D. in 1844, The Duality of the Mind, which was based on his idea that everyone had, in effect, two brains, the left and right cerebral hemispheres.)

In short, dual consciousness was considered the cutting edge of neuroscience in James’s time. (This insight was later eclipsed for much of the 20^th century by Freud’s mistaken views, but revived in the 1970s as Freud’s influence waned, feminism helped society see childhood trauma, and multiple personality was re-discovered.)

James’s conclusion in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature [1901-1902] (New York, The Modern Library, 1994), on pages 555-557, is as follows:

“The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity; and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required…At the same time the theologian’s contention that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In the religious life the control is felt as ‘higher’; but…on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling…”

In other words, our subjective experience (and its religious interpretation) of our unrecognized second self is that it is not-me; it is something external to me; and it is of a higher nature, from a higher realm; i.e., a Higher Power, Supreme Being, God.

I hasten to add that William James, himself, was a religious believer. Therefore, he further reasoned that his psychological explanation of religious experience does not prove that God doesn’t exist. God may simply be using the human mind as a medium through which to communicate with humans.

The purpose of this post is to give one reason why I don’t believe that normal multiple personality is limited to novelists. It is a widespread, normal, psychological phenomenon, which I would guess is present in at least 30% of the general population. But I think that novelists are a good example. And, incidentally, as you probably know, William James was novelist Henry James’s older brother.

Mark Twain: In Public, a Humorous “Liar”; In Private, “Absent-Minded”; The Inconsistencies and Memory Gaps of Multiple Personality 

In the New York Herald, 16 October 1900, Twain jokes about his relationship with the truth:

“Now, I have lied so much, in a genial, good-natured way, of course, that people won’t believe me when I speak the truth. I may add that I have stopped speaking the truth...I have found that when I speak the truth, I am not believed, and that I have never told a lie so big but that some one had sublime confidence in my veracity. I have, therefore, been forced by fate to adopt fiction as a medium of truth. Most liars lie for the love of the lie; I lie for the love of truth. I disseminate my true views by means of a series of apparently humorous and mendacious stories. If any man can do that, and finds that he can disseminate facts through the medium of falsehood, he should never speak the truth and I don’t.”

Is that clear?

In his private life, as noted in the post of December 10, 2013, his daughter, Susy, and his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, knew Twain as remarkably “absent-minded.”

In short, his humorous lying was his public cover story for his inconsistencies and memory gaps, signs of multiple personality (see posts of December 6 and 7, 2013).

One of Mark Twain’s Other Identities is Interviewed a Month Later

Yesterday’s post was about an interview of Mark Twain in August 1895. In that interview, he spoke as one who was intimately familiar with the writing and subject matter of his books.

The following month, in “A Chat with Mark Twain” in the Sunday Times of Sydney, Australia on 22 September 1895, it says that the interview inevitably turned to the question of whether Twain had any favorite among his books. Twain replied:

“No, I don’t think that I have, because I haven’t read them—that is, I mean, most of them were written so long ago that I have now only a vague notion of what is in them.”

After a pause he added: “I think I prefer Huckleberry Finn, but I believe the family prefer The Prince and the Pauper.”

Of course, I know that many readers will insist that Twain was simply joking. However, I have experience interviewing people who have multiple personality. They are experts at covering up for their inability to recall things that they should recall but don't (because that information is known to another personality). They change the subject or make a joke of it so that you are distracted or feel foolish for pursuing the issue.

Mark Twain Says He Did Not Invent Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

Most people assume that novelists invent and construct their characters through conscious, creative imagination. And they probably do invent some characters that way. But their major, most successful characters are said by novelists themselves to come to them mysteriously (Toni Morrison) or from memories of people they have known or read about (Mark Twain). 

In the post of October 26, 2013, “Toni Morrison and the Novelist’s Characters,” she was quoted as saying, in the context of discussing one of her major characters, “…many characters [come to me] rather full-fleshed and complete almost immediately, including [their] name.”

In an interview conducted by Lucius (Lute) Pease, published in the Portland Oregonian of 11 August 1895, Mark Twain said:

“Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were both real characters, but Tom Sawyer was not the real name of the former…Finn was the real name of the other boy, but I tacked on the Huckleberry…The characters were no creation of my own…

“I don’t believe an author, good, bad or indifferent, ever lived, who created a character. It was always drawn from his recollection of someone he had known…even when he is making no attempt to draw his character from life, when he is striving to create something different, even then, however ideal his drawing, he is yet unconsciously drawing from memory…

“In attempting to represent some character which he cannot recall, which he draws from what he thinks is his imagination, an author may often fall into the error of copying in part a character already drawn by another, a character which impressed itself upon his memory from some book. So he has made a picture of a picture with all his pains. We mortals can’t create, we can only copy. Some copies are good and some are bad.”

Scholarship may or may not support the idea that Twain copied Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn from life. The point here is that Twain did not subjectively experience his characters as having been invented by him, which is also true with Toni Morrison (see above), and which was also true with Dickens (June 2013 post).

The new character probably is, directly or indirectly, based on one or more real people or characters in books. But the theory of this blog is that the writer’s mind has taken those elements and molded them into an alternate personality with a mind of its own. And it is the latter that the novelist works with in writing the novel.

Mark Twain’s Conscience: A Child-Aged Alternate Personality

In an interview published in the August 17, 1890 edition of the New York Herald, Mark Twain said, “A conscience is like a child…be severe with it, argue with it, prevent it from coming to play with you at all hours and you will secure a good conscience. That is to say, a properly trained one…I think I have reduced mine to order. At least I haven’t heard from it for some time. Perhaps I’ve killed it through over severity. It’s wrong to kill a child, but in spite of all I have said a conscience differs from a child in many ways. Perhaps it is best when it’s dead.”

Of course, this is meant to be taken as a joke about how Twain is able to enjoy life by overcoming the inhibitions of conscience. But what struck me as very odd about this joke is his metaphor of conscience as a child. He could have made the same joke with conscience personified as an adult. Why did he personify conscience as a child?

When people discuss the origin of conscience, it is usually said that it comes from parents, society, and/or God. Have you ever heard any psychologist, sociologist, theologian, or anyone else say that conscience is an inner child?

Recall that in the December 14, 2013  post about Twain’s family calling him “Youth,” I inferred that they were talking about the youthful behavior of a child-aged alternate personality. So I am not surprised to find other evidence of a child-aged personality. Moreover, I have been arguing that Twain had multiple personality since the December 1, 2013 post. And in multiple personality, one of the most common types of alternate personality is the child-aged one, because multiple personality starts in childhood. Indeed, it is common for a person with multiple personality to have several child-aged alternate personalities.

Evidently, Twain found one of his child-aged alternate personalities to be annoyingly moralistic.

Multiple Identity Literary Theory is Antithetical To and Totally Rejects Freud’s or Lacan’s Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Literary Theory

Is the point of view presented in this blog found in any currently established literary theory? To find out, I bought Gregory Castle’s The Literary Theory Handbook (Wiley Blackwell, 2013), which is comprehensive and up-to-date.

I read the chapter on Psychoanalysis and could agree with nothing in it—from Freud to Lacan and others—nothing.

In the chapter on Trauma Studies, it is mentioned, in passing, that “trauma leads, as many psychologists attest, to dissociative personality disorders [i.e., multiple personality],” but no further mention of multiple personality follows.

I think that there is an automatic tendency to think that the views of a psychiatrist must be related to Freud, Lacan, etc. But my views do not agree with theirs, and, in essential ways, our views are antithetical (such as their belief in the unconscious, which I reject, in favor of the multiple, dissociated consciousness of multiple personalities).

It is a distinction with a real difference.

Mark Twain’s Wife and Father-in-Law Called Him “Youth,” Describing An Alternate Personality, Not a Term of Endearment

Mark Twain’s wife, who was ten years younger than he was, often called him “Youth.” Biographers and Twain himself have called this “a pet name,” but I disagree, because it is not a term of endearment. Lovers and spouses commonly refer to each other as “baby,” but not as “youth,” because the former says you are adorable, but the latter says you are immature.

Mark Twain said, “That word ‘Youth,’ as the reader has perhaps already guessed, was my wife’s pet name for me. It was gently satirical but also affectionate. I had certain mental and material peculiarities and customs proper to a much younger person than I was” (1, p. 99). In other words, he knew that he was loved, but he also knew the particular kind of behavior that “Youth” was referring to.

That “Youth” was not simply or primarily a marital term of endearment is confirmed by the fact that his father-in-law often called him “Youth,” too (1, p. 114).

In the context of Twain’s multiple personality (dissociative identity)—discussed in several posts earlier this month—we can now understand that “Youth” was a name coined by his family to describe Twain’s behavior when a brilliant, but immature, child-aged, alternate personality was out.

1. Clemens, Susy: Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain (by his thirteen-year-old daughter). Forward and Comments by Mark Twain. Edited with an Introduction by Charles Neider. Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, 1985.

Blog Demographics and Outlook After Six Months

I started this blog six months ago. It has been visited by a few thousand people from about thirty (30) countries. The most visits have come from the following ten countries:

—China

—Germany

—India

—Malaysia

—Philippines

—Russia

—South Korea

—Turkey

—United Kingdom

—United States (50%)

After six months, the blog is just getting started.

Mark Twain Had Both Excellent Memory and Absent-Mindedness: A Common Combination in Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)

In previous posts (Dec. 1, 6, 7, 2013), I argued that Mark Twain had multiple personality. And I highlighted the issue of memory gaps, which is a key clue to multiple personality, since one personality may have amnesia for the periods of time that other personalities were out.

One way a memory gap can manifest itself is that the person does not remember something that you would expect him to remember, because that knowledge is known by a different personality than the personality who is out at the time. When this happens, if you don’t think of multiple personality, you are likely to shrug off this memory lapse as absent-mindedness.

For example, in Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by his thirteen-year-old daughter Susy Clemens (Doubleday, 1985), she says, “He is the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent minded!”

Meanwhile, Twain was also known for his excellent memory. As Ron Powers tells us in Mark Twain: A Life (New York, Free Press, 2005), Twain had powers of memory that were “legendary” and “prodigious.”

The following dramatic incident is from Albert Bigelow Paine’s Mark Twain: A Biography, Volume 2, Chapter CXXVIII. The chapter is titled:

“Mark Twain’s Absent-Mindedness”

“…By no means was Mark Twain’s absent-mindedness a development of old age. On the [occasion] following he was in the very heyday of his mental strength…One day [he] set out to invite F. G. Whitmore over for a game of billiards. Whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and Clemens had been there time and again. It was such a brief distance that he started out in his slippers and with no hat. But when he reached the corner where the house…was in plain view he stopped. He did not recognize it…He stood there uncertainly a little while, then returned [home] and got the coachman…to show him the way.”

Evidently, the personality who played billiards was not the same personality who knew the way to Whitmore’s house.

Freud Neither Discovered Nor Understood The Unconscious: The Implications for Our Understanding of People and Literary Theory

The unconscious was discovered—and was a well-known, popular idea—before Freud was born. If you want to know the history, see Henri F. Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York, Basic Books, 1970).

In any case, “the unconscious” is a misnomer. I can explain why with an example from Freud’s book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which he thinks that he is illustrating and proving the existence of the unconscious, but he is not.

Freud describes an incident in his office in which he accidentally knocked over an item on his desk. The remarkable thing, Freud emphasizes, is that he “accidentally” knocked over something of little value, when his desk was crowded with things of much greater value. Thus, it was actually a feat requiring considerable attention and dexterity to have knocked over only that trivial item, proving that it was really no accident, and that his “unconscious” must have guided his hand.

But if his “unconscious” was paying attention and guiding his hand, what sense does it make to call it unconscious? It was only unconscious from the point of view of the part of Freud’s mind that was doing the writing. It was not unconscious. It was dissociated consciousness. That is, it was conscious, but was compartmentalized and split off from Freud’s regular consciousness.

Let’s use common sense. Something is not unconscious just because I’m not conscious of it. I’m not conscious of your thoughts, but that doesn’t make your thoughts unconscious. It’s just that your conscious thoughts are inaccessible to me. Just like the part of Freud’s mind that guided his hand in the "accident" was inaccessible to the part of Freud’s mind doing the writing.

In short, Freud’s example illustrates that he had dual consciousness, and that one of them didn’t know what the other was thinking, but did see what the other had done.

So everyone who thinks and talks about the unconscious should stop doing so, and instead think and talk about dissociated consciousness, which means multiple personality (dissociative identity).

Mark Twain’s Memory Gap (Dissociative Amnesia), a Clue to His Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)

In yesterday’s post, I discussed that having a history of memory gaps is a key clue to having multiple personality. In my December 1, 2013 post, I argued that Mark Twain had multiple personality. So it would be nice if there were evidence that Mark Twain had memory gaps.

Coincidentally, I was just reading Twain’s nonfiction article, “Mental Telegraphy” (1878/1891), in which he talks about his belief in, and experience of, mental telepathy. I had looked up this article for two reasons. First, I knew that people who are prone to psychic experiences tend to score high on dissociative experience rating scales, and that people who score the highest on such scales are people with multiple personality. Which is not to say that all people with psychic experiences have multiple personality, but only that there is some overlap between these two groups. Second, I hoped that Twain’s article might include some mention of psychological experiences more directly related to multiple personality, such as memory gaps. I was not disappointed.

At the end of the “Postscript” section of his article on mental telegraphy, Twain describes a personal experience that he says brought him “to the conclusion that you can be asleep—at least wholly unconscious—for a time, and not suspect that it has happened…

“About a year ago I was standing on the porch one day, when I saw a man coming up the walk…I was looking straight at that man; he had got to within ten feet of the door…and suddenly he disappeared…I was unspeakably delighted. I had seen an apparition at last, with my own eyes, in broad daylight…”

Twain then went into his house and was shocked to find the man inside. Evidently, the man was not an apparition and had not disappeared, but had continued on his way to the front door, and had been let in.

“During at least sixty seconds that day I was asleep or at least totally unconscious, without suspecting it. In that interval the man came to my immediate vicinity, rang, stood there and waited, then entered and closed the door, and I did not see him and did not hear the door slam.”

This not only documents that Twain had memory gaps, but also illustrates why it may be difficult for a person who has had memory gaps to tell you about them. As Twain says, you can have a memory gap “and not suspect that it has happened.”

Twain had not known that he had had a memory gap until he saw the man inside his house and put two and two together. If the man had turned around and walked away, and had not been found inside the house, Twain would not have known that he had lost time.

Even when people lose hours of time, they may not realize it, if, for example, they were at home, could have been taking a nap, and there is nothing to indicate what they were actually doing.

Two Keys to Diagnosis of Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity): The Person’s Puzzling Inconsistencies and Unreported Memory Gaps

Puzzling Inconsistencies

Real people are not perfectly consistent and predictable. So fiction writers make sure to add a little inconsistency and unpredictability to help turn a “flat” two-dimensional character into a “round” three-dimensional character.

Nevertheless, real people do not act randomly. They are fairly consistent and have reasonable predictability, which is the basis for our concept that a person has a personality.

So what should we make of it if a person has puzzling inconsistencies? One possibility is that we really don't know the person very well, and they have things going on in their life that we don't know about, and these things, once known, will easily explain the inconsistencies. But what if we do know the person very well and we still find their inconsistencies puzzling?

Unreported Memory Gaps

Most people assume that if a person had memory gaps they would complain about it. And that is a safe assumption if the memory gaps are something new. But what if the person has had memory gaps since childhood? It is part of the fabric of their life. It is nothing new. For all they know, everyone else has the same thing. And so it just seems to them like something that is best to ignore. If you don’t ask them about it, they will never tell you.

Most psychiatrists, like most other people, never ask about memory gaps:

Psychiatric News

American Psychiatric Association

Letter to the Editor

May 04, 2007

Mental Status Exam

Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D.

The standard mental status exam's assessment of memory has a blind spot. It doesn't ask patients if they've had recurrent sober memory gaps (dissociative amnesia), which is often the only clue that a patient might have dissociative identity disorder (DID). It leaves it to patients to raise the issue.

Why don't undiagnosed DID patients bring up the subject of their memory gaps? First, they don't know its clinical significance (that these might be times that other identities were "out"). Second, they are generally unaware that they've lost time, except when something embarrassing, confusing, or disturbing confronts them with the fact, and they don't like to think about it. Third, they're afraid that telling people they have memory gaps—periods of time they don't remember and when they're not in control of their own behavior—might make people think they're "crazy."

Why do clinicians need a "clue" (memory gaps) to the presence of DID? What's the mystery? When DID is present, isn't it obvious? If you've ever seen an interview of a known DID patient, weren't the switches from one identity to another something you couldn't miss?

Actually, what you see in such an interview is the postdiagnosis picture, not how DID presents. Prediagnosis, alternate identities usually answer to the patient's regular name, because they prefer to remain incognito. They lose that reticence once diagnosis has blown their cover, but all that you would have found prediagnosis (if you had inquired) were memory gaps.

Once you discover that your patient does have a history of memory gaps, you can ask about these episodes. For example, after some gaps, a patient finds poems. She agrees that nobody else could have written these poems (which she found among her personal papers), but she doesn't remember writing them; they don't express her views, and they're not even in her handwriting.

Keeping the interview focused on these poems will eventually cause a switch to the identity who wrote them. You might ask this identity why she writes poems, her age, and her name. If you then turn the focus away from the poems, or simply address the patient by her regular name, you will prompt a switch back to the regular identity, who has amnesia (a memory gap) for your conversation with the poetry-writing identity.

The standard mental status exam does not now, but should, screen for memory gaps (dissociative amnesia). Otherwise, when it comes to diagnosing DID, the clinician will be clueless.

Conclusion

If you find that a person has puzzling inconsistencies and previously unreported memory gaps, use your common sense and intelligence to find the reason and to account for these facts.

Mark Twain Had Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity), Say His Pen Name, Deathbed Confession, Van Wyck Brooks, and Twain’s Last Novel [this is the first of a series of posts on Mark Twain; to see them all, search Twain in this blog]

Samuel Clemens’s pen name, Mark Twain, proclaims his duality.

When he was near death, and literally on his deathbed, which made anything he spoke about a sort of deathbed confession, Twain spoke about “dual personalities” (1, p. 626).

Van Wyck Brooks—who, in the 1930s, won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize in history—was the first to say that Twain had multiple personality. In his 1920 book, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, Brooks said the following:

“…He never knew what to think of himself, he was of two minds all the time…He seems to exhibit himself, on the one hand, as a child of nature conscious of extraordinary powers that make all the world and even the Almighty solicitous about him, and on the other, as a humble, a humiliated man, confessedly second-rate, who has lost nine of the ten talents committed to him and almost begs permission to keep the one that remains…

“…It is perfectly evident what happened to Mark Twain at this moment [at age twelve, when his father died]: he became, and his immediate manifestation of somnambulism [sleepwalking] is the proof of it, a dual personality…The subject of dual personality was always, as we shall see, an obsession with Mark Twain; he who seemed to his friends such a natural-born actor, who was, in childhood, susceptible not only to somnambulism but to mesmeric control, had shown from the outset a distinct tendency toward what is called dissociation of consciousness…” (2, pp. 35-61).

So people have long suspected that Mark Twain had multiple personality. And, contributing to that speculation, Twain did the same thing that Dickens had done with his last, posthumous novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (see June 2013 post): Twain wrote his own, last, posthumous, novel—No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (3)—about the same issue, multiple personality.

The story of the novel takes place in the year 1490, in Austria, where it is still the Middle Ages. A printing company—Twain worked as a printer before he became a writer—has its offices in a large castle. “One cold day…a most forlorn looking youth…appeared in the door…timid and humble…his clothes were coarse and old, ragged…lightly powdered with snow…the apparition” was seeking work. “What is your name?” they ask. He answers, “Number 44, New Series 864,962,” which is mysterious and strange.

So 44 is put to work. He learns printing surprisingly fast, at least in part because he can read the mind of the equally youthful printer who befriends him and who is the narrator of the story. But the other printers are offended by the way a vagabond has been allowed to join their profession. So they bully 44 and then go on strike to protest his employment. The strike threatens to bring the business to ruin.

To save the day, 44 creates living, breathing Duplicates of the striking printers. He explains to the narrator why this is possible:

“You know, of course, that you are not one person, but two. One is your Workaday-Self…the other is your Dream-Self…”

“But 44, these Duplicates are solid enough!”

“…we pulled them out of the Originals and gave them independent life.”

However, the duplicates—doubles, secret sharers, alternate personalities, call them what you will—are not happy about being incarnated and having to come out from the interior, hidden, dream-world, where they usually reside. They feel that their lives had been much better on the inside. They would have preferred to go back inside to the dream-world, where they had no constraints, and where the only limit to reality was their imagination.

The moral of the story is that Mark Twain agreed with Margaret Atwood when she said that writers have multiple personality (Oct. 27, 2013 post).

1. Powers, Ron: Mark Twain: A Life. New York, Free Press, 2005.

2. Leary, Lewis (ed.): A Casebook on Mark Twain’s Wound. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1962.

3. Twain, Mark: No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969/1982. (This edition of the novel is the approved, authenticated text, according to the Center for Editions of American Authors, Modern Language Association of America.)