Most Novels are Not Mechanically Constructed: So when novels have features of multiple personality, it is likely that their authors do, too.

A novel has features of multiple personality when it has any of the following:

—a character who is acknowledged to have multiple personality

—a character who has unacknowledged multiple personality

—gratuitous multiple personality: it plays no part in the plot

—the theme of the double in any of its versions

—a character has multiple personality type of memory gaps

—a child character who never grows up, like child-aged alters

—peculiarly unreliable narrators (alters have limited perspective)

—nameless characters (alternate personalities are often nameless)

—magical thinking or magical realism (multiple personality is magical)

—a character refers to himself with “we” or “our”

—themes of hiddenness or dividedness or transformation or mirrors

—a character sees someone else in the mirror

Of course, some of the above imply multiple personality only when taken in a certain context. For example, not all hiddenness implies multiple personality. However, when it is unusual in kind or degree, consider multiple personality, which is a condition of hiddenness.

But what has all this to do with the author? Novels are fiction, not autobiography!

This raises the question of how novels are written. Do you believe that the kinds of things listed above get into novels because novelists mechanically and methodically construct them?

If you have read what great novelists say about their creative process—some of which I have quoted in this blog—you know that, for the most part, mechanical construction is not how their creativity works.

What about imagination? Well, if the author’s imagination works like the imagination of a person with multiple personality, what is the difference? Multiple personality is imaginary. People who have it are not really more than one person.