Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Dialogue with the Mirror”: A Multiple Personality Story

The connection between mirrors and multiple personality is well known.

In literature, there is Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.”

In psychiatry, the connection is so well known that it has been used as the title of a book about multiple personality: The Stranger in the Mirror by Marlene Steinberg MD and Maxine Schnall (Harper, 2000).

The reason for the connection between mirrors and multiple personality is that each of the various personalities has a different self-image. So if the personality who happens to be looking in a mirror has a self-image that is different from the person’s actual appearance, he won’t recognize himself. He will see a stranger in the mirror.

That is the situation in Marquez’s short story. The man who has been shaving sees blood on the face in the mirror, but not on his own face. “There were no wounds on his skin, but there in the mirror the other one was bleeding slightly.”

That is not Magical Realism. It is multiple personality.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Collected Stories. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.

Added March 16, 2021: In addition to what I said above, the host (regular) personality of a person with multiple personality may see, in a mirror, alternate personalities that look nothing like the regular personality. Search "mirror" and "mirrors" to see various posts on this subject.

Also search "magical realism," which is often not a literary technique, but a description of the fiction writer's actual experiences, because one or another of the writer's alternate personalities has a fanciful view of reality (which may be useful for writing fiction). But since the host personality, and most alternate personalities have an objective view of reality, multiple personality is not a psychosis.