Two Arguing Characters Named Philip Roth in Operation Shylock Flaunt Philip Roth’s Normal Multiple Personality

“Many host personalities…have some form of communication with…alters [alternate personalities]…although they are usually not aware [that this is multiple personality, per se]. The experience of the host personality is that he or she gets into arguments with himself or herself” (1, p. 82).

This kind of arguing between the host personality and alter personality is given literary form in Roth’s Operation Shylock, in which the protagonist, novelist “Philip Roth,” continually gets into arguments with his double, who is also named “Philip Roth” (nicknamed “Moishe Pipik").

Regular Roth says that he has long known about literary doubles, but thought it was just fiction. “…doubles, I thought, figure mainly in books, as fully materialized duplicates…fictions about the fictions of the self-divided,” like Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Golyadkin the First and Golyadkin the Second” (2, p. 115) in Dostoevsky’s The Double.

Gratuitous Personality-Switch

In a chapter titled “I Am Pipik,” the real Roth suddenly starts to think and act like the false Roth (nicknamed “Pipik”). “On I went, usurping the identity of the usurper who had usurped mine”…”On and on and on, obeying an impulse I did nothing to quash” (2, p. 156). Regular Roth feels like an innocent bystander as he is temporarily taken over and possessed by the Pipik personality.

This personality-switch might be misconstrued as having a literary justification, since it does create the potential for dramatically useful misunderstandings among certain characters. But the same thing could have been accomplished if the regular Roth had been described as only pretending to have his double’s attitudes. Instead, what is described is Pipik's personality taking over. It is a multiple personality type of personality-switch.

Significance of Gratuitous Personality-Switch

How did Roth come to write Operation Shylock? Did he decide to write a double story like Stevenson or Dostoevsky, but wanted to outdo those writers by naming both doubles after himself and subtitling the book “a confession”? Or was the reason more psychological? Does Roth, like other great novelists, have normal multiple personality?

As one approach to answering this question, I looked in Operation Shylock for things that were unnecessary in literary terms, things whose only reason for being there was that the author was personally familiar with it, and he was writing what he knew. And since there is no literary reason for the main character’s having the personality-switch just mentioned, I infer that the author’s reason for including it was that he was writing from personal experience. Which was probably why he was writing a story with two characters named after himself, and calling it “a confession,” in the first place.

“Manifold personality,” “mirrored fragments,” “so many speakers”

“Is there a more manifold personality in all the world. I don’t say divided. Divided is nothing. Even the goyim are divided. But inside every Jew there is a mob of Jews…[an] amassment of mirrored fragments…inside each Jew [are] so many speakers” (2, pp. 334-335). These gratuitous comments evidently reflect Roth’s subjective experience of normal multiple personality.

The Irrelevant Disclaimer

In conclusion, let me comment on the book’s disclaimer. The “Note to the Reader” says, “This book is a work of fiction…Any resemblance to actual…persons…is entirely coincidental. This confession is false” (2, p. 399).

But the disclaimer does not apply to the author’s psychology, since it explicitly states that the book is “a product of the author’s imagination” (2, p. 399).

And how does a person get multiple personality? Not from psychosis or demon possession. It is a product of the person’s imagination.

But don’t phrase it that way if you are talking to an alternate personality, unless you want to start an argument.

1. Frank W. Putnam. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

2. Philip Roth. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1993.