Nobel Prize novelist Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, a novel about multiple identities, possibly multiple personality

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) had worked intermittently on this story for nearly fifty years, and it was still unfinished at the time of his death. Why so long and inconclusive? Was it just an idea he had picked up from the story of a real-life confidence man, or from other things he had read? Was it a metaphor for hidden struggles with sexual orientation? Or is this another example of a novelist’s saving his personal issue with multiple personality for his last novel, like Dickens’s Drood, Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, and Melville’s Confidence Man?

The first-person narrator, Felix Krull, works as a waiter at a Paris hotel, where he sleeps in the employees' dormitory. At the same time, he maintains an apartment elsewhere in Paris where he keeps an upper-class set of clothes, which he wears when he dines out with the rich. This “amounted, as one can see, to a kind of dual existence, whose charm lay in the ambiguity as to which figure was the real I and which was the masquerade…Thus I masqueraded in both capacities, and the undisguised reality behind the two appearances, the real I, could not be identified because it actually did not exist” (1, p. 230).

He had never been satisfied to be who he was, “glorying as I did in the independent and self-sufficient exercise of my imagination,” “holding lively imaginary conversations,” and even bringing “the muscles controlling the pupils…under voluntary control. I would stand in front of my mirror, concentrating all my powers in a command to my pupils to contract or expand…My persistent efforts, let me tell you, were, in fact, crowned with success…I actually succeeded in contracting them to the merest points and then expanding them to great, round, mirror-like pools. The joy I felt at this success was almost terrifying and was accompanied by a shudder at the mystery of man” (1, pp. 10-12).

NOTE: The reason I quote this about controlling his pupils is that some people with multiple personality appear to have alternate personalities who differ from each other in visual acuity, and this might be caused by alters' differing from each other in pupillary contraction.

“My basic attitude toward the world and society can only be called inconsistent…There was, for example, an idea that occasionally preoccupied me…It was the idea of interchangeability” (1, p. 224).

The rest of the novel is about his exchange of identities with someone.

In conclusion, I can’t say with certainty that Felix Krull is about multiple personality or that this would mean that Thomas Mann had multiple personality. But I think that the above is sufficient to raise the possibility.

1. Thomas Mann. Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. Translated from the German by Denver Lindley. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.