Gillian Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects: As in Gone Girl and Dark Places, the protagonist has multiple personality, but in this novel it is the title issue

The plot of Sharp Objects is about solving several murders—which turn out to have been committed by the protagonist’s mother and half sister—all of which serves to dramatize the protagonist’s traumatic childhood.

The novel’s main issue is indicated by the title, Sharp Objects, which refers, not to the murders, but to the knives and razor blades used by the protagonist, Camille, to cut and scar her skin since childhood. (As readers of this blog know, multiple personality begins in a traumatic childhood).

Camille has a history of being psychiatrically hospitalized for self-cutting. She has a beautiful face, but scars from self-cutting cover her body from the neck down. She is no longer cutting, but her urge to cut continues throughout the novel.

A few brief quotes from a textbook on multiple personality will help you to understand what I will then quote from the novel.

Self-Cutting in Multiple Personality

“Self-mutilation—typically cutting with glass or razor blades, or burning with cigarettes or matches—occurs in at least a third of MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients. The percentage of self-mutilators is probably much higher, because this behavior is often not reported to therapists and is rarely spontaneously discovered except by physical examination” (1, p. 64).

“The sites of self-mutilation in MPD are often hidden from casual examination and commonly include upper arms (hidden by long sleeves), back, inner thighs, breasts, and buttocks. Self-mutilation frequently takes the form of delicate self-cutting with razor blades or fragments of glass” (1, p. 89).

“…persecutor personalities are found in the majority of MPD patients. The persecutor personalities usually direct their acts of hostility toward the host [regular] personality…Suicide is an ever-present issue with multiples. The internal persecutors may be threatening to commit suicide themselves, threatening to kill the host (internal homicide), or urging or commanding the host to kill himself or herself…Self-mutilation by persecutors to punish the host or other alters is common” (1, pp. 205-206).

In this blog, suicide in multiple personality was seen in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Internal homicide was my interpretation of Doris Lessing’s To Room Nineteen. Self-cutting has not been discussed in the blog previously.

Camille’s Skin Speaks

Camille has carved specific words into her skin. The words are not experienced by her as being her own thoughts. They just seem to come to her or appear on her skin or are “screamed” at her, and she feels the urge to take sharp objects and cut these words into her skin.

The fact that these are specific words, not just feelings, suggests that they are communications from some sort of thinker. The compulsion to carve them into her skin might indicate that the thinker wants his or her thoughts to be taken seriously and remembered.

Actually, there seems to be more than one thinker behind these words, since the “words” are sometimes described as “squabbling at each other”:

“I am a cutter…My skin, you see, screams. It’s covered with words—cook, cupcake, kitty, curls—as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh…my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked…The problem started long before that…The last word I ever carved into myself, sixteen years after I started: vanish. Sometimes I can hear the words squabbling at each other across my body…Vanish did it for me. I’d saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in. I stayed at the hospital twelve weeks. It’s a special place for people who cut, almost all of them women, most under twenty-five. I went when I was thirty” (2, pp. 60-63).

Camille is not psychotic. But how can a person who is not psychotic have the subjective experiences and overt behavior described above? The likely explanation is that she gets these messages from, and is pushed to self-cut by, one or more alternate personalities.

However, if she were a real person coming to me for psychiatric evaluation, I would not make the diagnosis of multiple personality unless and until I actually met and interviewed one or more alternate personalities (without using any drugs or hypnosis).

For example, I might look at the words carved into her skin, choose one, and, since Camille says that she didn’t think up that word, I would ask, “Who said [specific word]?” If she had multiple personality, then in reaction to my question I would see a change in demeanor, the alternate personality involved with that specific word would identify herself, and the alter would be able to provide verifiable information previously unknown to my patient.

Does Gillian Flynn understand Camille?

She would if she had mechanically constructed the character, but most novelists don’t get their characters that way. I would guess that she had read of, or knew, someone who was a cutter, that the idea incubated in her mind, and that one day the character came alive for her. So I think it unlikely that Flynn has any deep psychological understanding of the character.

What about my theory that novelists have a normal version of multiple personality and that they use it to write their novels? Well, I do believe that, but that doesn’t mean most novelists know they have multiple personality or that I know what part it played in the writing of any particular novel.

As I have said in previous posts, apart from my analyses of Gone Girl and Dark Places, the only things I know about Gillian Flynn are that her favorite mystery novelist is Agatha Christie (see my posts on Christie), and that, as a child, one of Flynn’s favorite movies was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which the main character has multiple personality.

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

2. Gillian Flynn. Sharp Objects. New York, Broadway Paperbacks, 2006.

Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places, like the author’s Gone Girl, has a protagonist who is unintentionally portrayed as probably having multiple personality

Libby Day, now in her thirties, had been only seven when her mother and two sisters were savagely murdered by an unknown intruder. However, before, perhaps even apart from, or only worse after, that trauma, she describes herself as mean, unlovable, feral, a liar, a thief, angry, hateful, and vicious:

“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ…I was never a good little girl, and I got worse after the murders…I was not a lovable child, and I’d grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs” (1, p. 1).

“I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there…But the meanness usually wins out” (1, p. 2).

“ ‘Baby Day’ I said aloud. It’s what I call myself when I’m feeling hateful” (1, p. 5).

“I’d been a sleepwalker since I could toddle” (1, p. 41).

“I am a liar and a thief” (1, p. 51).

“Over the next ten years, I totaled [Aunt Diane’s] car twice, broke her nose twice, stole and sold her credit cards, and killed her dog” (1, p. 113).

“I had angry, defensive conversations in my head, got mad at things that hadn’t happened yet” (1, p. 152).

“…a box with more than a hundred small bottles of lotion I’ve swiped” (1, p. 153). Throughout the book, she steals things for no obvious reason.

As a girl, she gave another girl a black eye, and explained to her sister that the Devil made her do it. (1, p. 155).

“I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way” (1, p. 191).

“Back in grade school, my shrinks tried to channel my viciousness into a constructive outlet, so I cut things with scissors…I sliced through them with old metal shears going up and down: hateyouhateyouhateyou” (1, p. 208).

“I woke up feeling like I dreamt about my Mom. I was craving her weird hamburgers…Which was strange since I don’t eat meat. But I wanted one of those burgers” (1, p. 290).

Much of the above, especially its inconsistencies, is suggestive of a dissociative disorder like multiple personality. Not all sleepwalking and kleptomania is explained by alternate personalities, but some cases are. She has another name, “Baby Day,” for her hateful self, as an alternate personality would. She sometimes has conversations in her head, which is suggestive of alternate personalities arguing among themselves. But, really, most of the negative behavior described above is out-of-character—suggestive of alternate personalities—since Libby does not seem to be a nasty, vicious person according to most of what the reader sees of her.

So why is Libby described throughout the book with out-of-character inconsistencies? Why is she portrayed with dissociative symptoms and as possibly suffering from a dissociative disorder like multiple personality?

Is it to make her one of the suspects as to who killed her mother and sisters? (The plot is about Libby’s investigation to find the real murderer.) But the nature of the murders and Libby’s age at that time disqualify her as a suspect. 

So there is really no literary justification in regard to plot or character development for many of the things we are told about her. It is what I call gratuitous multiple personality.

In short, as in Gone Girl (2012) (see my past post), Dark Places features a protagonist with unintentional, unacknowledged, and generally unrecognized multiple personality.

1. Gillian Flynn. Dark Places. New York, Broadway Books, 2009.

Vladimir Nabokov says novels are prewritten; presented to his imagination; he only reproduces them; but he, not characters, controls the reproductive process

“…I always have at the very start a curiously clear preview of the entire novel before me or above me…the entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make out and as precisely as I am humanly able to do. The greatest happiness I experience in composing is when I feel I cannot understand, or rather catch myself not understanding (without the presupposition of an already existing creation) how or why that image or structural move or exact formulation of phrase has just come to me…”

Interviewer: “One often hears from writers talk of how a character takes hold of them and in a sense dictates the course of the action. Has this ever been your experience?”

“I have never experienced this. What a preposterous experience! Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane. No, the design of my novel is fixed in my imagination and every character follows the course I imagine for him. I am the perfect dictator in that private world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth! Whether I reproduce it as fully and faithfully as I would wish, is another question” (1, pp. 93-94).

[Added 5:40 p.m.] So who did, in some other dimension, so to speak, write the novel in the first place, and provide it in an idealized format to Nabokov's novelist personality? One or more behind-the-scenes alternate personalities.

1. Vladimir Nabokov. Strong Opinions [1973]. London, Penguin Classics, 2012.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair Postscript: Was one of the narrator’s twenty-five handwritings—the feminine-juvenile one—that of Nabokov’s Lolita personality?

“a round diminutive one with a pleasant plumpness about its curves, so that every word looks like a newly baked fancy-cake”

Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair: The protagonist has both psychotic and dissociative symptoms, the latter probably reflecting the novelist’s multiple personality

In the author’s Foreword, Nabokov refers to his main character, a first-person narrator, as “mad Hermann” (1, p. xiv). Writers use the vague word “mad” when they do not distinguish between psychotic conditions like schizophrenia and dissociative conditions like multiple personality.

In the novel, Hermann is portrayed as having both psychotic and dissociative symptoms. His main psychotic symptom is the visual hallucination and delusion that another man, Felix, is his look-alike “double.”  Based on his psychotic misperception of objective reality—the two men do not look alike—Hermann kills Felix to collect life insurance on himself, which is the novel’s plot.

In contrast, Hermann’s dissociative symptoms have nothing to do with the novel’s plot. They are gratuitous. As previously discussed in this blog, gratuitous multiple personality in a novel probably reflects the author’s own multiple personality. Hermann’s two best-described dissociative symptoms are his dissociative split and his multiple handwritings.

“Dissociation” of “that imp Split”

“I had noticed lately…a certain aberration which, I understand, is not as uncommon as I thought at first among high-strung men in their middle thirties. I am referring to a well-known kind of ‘dissociation’…For example, I would be in bed with Lydia [his wife]…when all at once I would become aware that imp Split had taken over…at the same time [that he was in bed with Lydia] I was standing naked in the middle of the room…the sensation of being in two places at once gave me an extraordinary kick” (1, p. 27). Herman describes this experience of dissociation as being very enjoyable, and he sought to experience it as often as possible.

Twenty-five Handwritings

“I have exactly twenty-five handwritings, the best (i.e., those I use the most readily) being as follows: a round diminutive one with a pleasant plumpness about its curves, so that every word looks like a newly baked fancy-cake; then a fast cursive, sharp and nasty, the scribble of a hunchback in a hurry, with no dearth of abbreviations; then a suicide’s hand, every letter a noose, every comma a trigger; then the one I prize most: big, legible, firm and absolutely impersonal…It was in such a hand that I began writing this book now offered to the reader; soon, however, my pen ran amok: this book is written in all my twenty-five hands mixed together…” (1, p. 80).

The only psychiatric condition with multiple handwritings is multiple personality.

1. Vladimir Nabokov. Despair [1932; revised 1965]. New York, Vintage International, 1989.

Will Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, or any other novelist, ever describe, in depth and detail, how fiction writing is actually done?

My June 29, 2015 post quotes Stephen King on writing, from his book On Writing (2000) and other sources. Those quotations get to the heart of fiction writing. But King never actually discusses these things in any depth or detail. And neither have any other novelists.

The reason that novelists never discuss their creative process in any depth or detail is that the part of the novelist’s mind that is speaking about writing is not the only part of the novelist’s mind that is responsible for the writing.

As King’s quotations imply, the part of his mind that wrote On Writing is only one part of his mind, and this one part does not know the whole story of his writing process.

Moreover, the novelist’s regular “host” personality may be afraid of knowing too much about the writing process. Like Adam and Eve, they may fear that eating from the tree of knowledge might get them kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

However, they needn’t worry. The hidden parts of their mind—once assured that they will not be banished—would be only too happy to tell their story.

Alcohol Blackout Postscript: During Heather’s “blackout,” did she fail to recognize her husband because of cognitive impairment or multiple personality?

One of the classic signs of multiple personality is when a person—one who obviously does not have advanced Alzheimer’s—does not recognize someone they know very well. If this happens when no alcohol or drugs are involved, the person may be called “absent-minded.” If it happens when the person is intoxicated, the failure to recognize someone they know may be attributed to a “blackout.” But it is a classic sign of multiple personality.

In multiple personality, some personalities are co-conscious and know each other’s business, but other personalities are not co-conscious and don’t know each other’s business. The latter situation is why multiples have memory gaps. If the drinking personality is not co-conscious with the regular “host” personality, then the drinking personality may not know that the person is married.

All kinds of out-of-character behavior seen during supposed alcohol blackouts may be due to multiple personality. For example, if the person’s actual age is 30, but the drinking personality has a much younger self-image—say that of a 13-year-old—behavior that might be obnoxious but understandable in an adolescent might seem outrageous and totally unacceptable for person who is 30.

In general, if a person you know is showing distinctly out-of-character behavior, you might ask the person “Who are you?” or, since an alternate personality is often reluctant, at first, to reveal its name, “How old are you?” Of course, to have any hope of getting a serious answer, you have to ask your question in a perfectly matter-of-fact way and without even the slightest trace of sarcasm.

If the person, speaking in all sincerity, gives you an age different from their true age—say 13 instead of 30—then you know you are speaking to an alternate personality. The same is true if they give either a completely different name or a nickname that they don’t always use.

In short, at least consider the possibility of multiple personality whenever a person, drinking or not, has out-of-character behavior.

Alcohol Blackouts: Some people report that an alternate personality takes over in their alcoholic blackouts, but researchers never consider multiple personality

Persons who had alcoholic blackouts emailed descriptions of their blackouts—based on circumstantial evidence and what witnesses had told them—to Donal F. Sweeney, M.D., board certified in internal medicine and addiction medicine. Dr. Sweeney quotes many of these descriptions in Cries From The Abyss: Alcohol Blackouts Revealed (Santa Barbara, Mnemosyne Press, 2008). For example, Heather writes:

“I am 30 years old and out of control. I only allow myself to go out once a week, because every time I do I wake up the next morning and can’t remember hardly anything…

“Once I decided to walk home from a party…I ended up being raped…

“Once I got mouthy with a guy who I thought was being rude to his girlfriend, and he punched me in the mouth, knocking me and five teeth out…

“I freaked out at a Christmas party and didn’t even recognize my own husband…

“I drove 300 miles one night before coming out of my blackout and realized I was in another city.

“I wrote myself a letter when I was in a blackout, saying how much I hated myself and that when I wasn’t looking I was going to kill myself. It was like an evil alter ego talking. It was really scary…

“I am a church going, conservative, professional family woman…

“The blackouts occur almost every time I drink…It’s like another personality takes over…It’s really strange. I have no control over this ‘other self’…It’s like a different personality comes out of me. I get mouthy, obnoxious, combative, dangerous, hateful, self-destructive, in extreme cases suicidal, fearless, etc. I don’t even recognize friends and family…”

Since a number of the people reporting blackouts to Dr. Sweeney say that it’s like another personality takes over, he has a whole chapter addressing this issue—Chapter Nine, “Who Do I Become?”—but multiple personality is never considered.

Nor does it occur either to Dr. Sweeney or Dr. White—the latter writing for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (“What Happened? Alcohol, Memory Blackouts, and the Brain” http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh27-2/186-196.htm)—to ask any of the people with alcoholic blackouts if they ever have memory gaps when they had not been drinking.

As I mentioned in a past post, alcoholics who have memory gaps because they have multiple personality—involving an alternate personality who likes to drink—may also have memory gaps related to non-drinking alternate personalities. But, since the non-drinking personalities may be out for briefer periods of time and may engage in less dramatic or disruptive behavior, the person may not mention these memory gaps unless specifically asked.

It used to be thought that an alcohol blackout was a sign of severe, chronic alcoholism. But studies in recent years show that many people have blackouts when they first start drinking. Now I raise this question: In what percentage of cases is an “alcoholic blackout” a symptom of multiple personality in which an alternate personality likes to drink?

The first step in answering that question is to ask people with “alcohol blackouts” if they have ever had even a small, tiny blackout either when they had not been drinking at all or when they had been drinking relatively little. Anyone who has non-alcoholic memory gaps might then be evaluated for multiple personality.

But I think Heather should be evaluated for multiple personality just on the basis of what she is quoted as saying above. How blatant does multiple personality have to be before anyone thinks of it?

NY Times Book Review interviews Sue Grafton (post 6): People with multiple personality “disagree with themselves,” and their characters “spark to life”

In tomorrow’s Book Review, Sue Grafton, bestselling author of the Kinsey Millhone detective novels—“X,” the twenty-fourth novel of the alphabetically-titled series was recently published—is interviewed.

She is asked which of her novels she likes the least. Grafton answers: “N is for Noose, though I bet if I went back and read it, I might disagree with myself.”

People with one personality may change their opinion or be ambivalent, but people with multiple personality may disagree with themselves.

What book most inspired Grafton’s literary career? Grafton says: “I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane. I’m not saying I fell in love with the book, but after Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, what a revelation! I was 12, and it may have been the moment when the spirit of Kinsey Millhone first sparked to life.”

Notice how she refers to her main character, Kinsey Millhone. Grafton doesn’t say that she decided to create a character or that she thought up Kinsey Millhone. No, Kinsey just “sparked to life.”

Objectively, Kinsey was a product of Grafton’s imagination. But subjectively, Grafton did not construct or willfully imagine Kinsey. No, Kinsey just “sparked to life” during Grafton’s childhood, which is when multiple personality begins.

If Grafton’s subjective experience had been of having actively created and imagined Kinsey, then she would experience Kinsey as a kind of puppet, whose thoughts and actions are determined by Grafton. But that was not Grafton’s subjective experience of how Kinsey came into being.

Since Grafton’s experience was that Kinsey “sparked to life” of her own accord, it naturally follows that Grafton would experience Kinsey as having a mind of her own, which is how Grafton does experience Kinsey.

Grafton, like most novelists, has, uses, and enjoys a normal version of multiple personality.

Tennessee Williams: The Great American Playwright says He Draws Every Character — e.g., Blanche DuBois — Out of His “Multiple Split Personality”

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (1911–1983) was an American playwright and author of many stage classics. Along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller he is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th century American drama…His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on the short list of being among the finest American plays in the 20th century alongside Long Day's Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman. —Wikipedia

INTERVIEWER: When Flaubert was asked who was Madame Bovary, he answered that it was himself. Do you feel that way toward any of your heroines?

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: I think I draw every character out of my very multiple split personality. My heroines always express the climate of my interior world at the time in which those characters were created. Now some people are persistently claiming that Blanche DuBois is a transvestite! This is ridiculous…Blanche is pure feminine just as this interior woman, this, what do you call it, Doppelgänger...the other self...There is within me, I seriously believe, a female Doppelgänger and that is why I create female characters. But that Doppelgänger, despite my physical appearance...is soft and beautiful (1).

1. Tennessee Williams. Interview by John Calendo in Interview, April 1973. http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/new-again-tennessee-williams/print/

Sarah Hepola’s Blackout (post 2): Quotations of passages mentioning that the author heard voices—neither psychotic nor alcoholic—as do many writers

As seen in the quotations below, Ms. Hepola heard voices, which were neither psychotic nor alcoholic. They were not psychotic, because, no matter how real they seemed to her, she nevertheless had intact reality-testing, which is psychiatric jargon meaning that she knew the voices were subjective. The voices were not caused by the alcohol, but were the voices commonly heard by many writers: search “voice” for my May 4, 2014 post on the writer’s voices.

“I think I knew I was in trouble. The small, still voice inside me always knew” (1, p. 11).

“…the pendulum could swing inside my brain all night: I will, no I won’t; I should, no I can’t. I drank to drown those voices…” (1, p. 22).

“The wine turned down the volume on my own self-doubt, which is what a blocked writer is battling: the bullying voices in her head…my inner critic…Sometimes…I would drink myself blind…I’d find myself reading over the words later and thinking: Wow, this is pretty good. I didn’t even know I thought that…They had the last-call honesty of someone pulling the listener close. We only have a few more minutes. Let me tell you everything” (1, pp. 86-87).

“I woke up at 5 am each day, chest hammering with anxiety, and crawled into the closet for a few hours to shut out unpleasant voices…I liked how the voices in my mind stopped chattering the moment the doorknob clicked” (1, p. 134-136).

Recalling an experience when she was 14: “I’d had three wine coolers before we went into the room, not enough to black out but enough to have a warm buzz…I remember lying on the floor…and the voice screaming in my brain: Am I having sex right now?” (1, p. 201).

“Alcohol…silenced my inner critic…I even loved writing hungover, when I was too exhausted to argue with myself…(1, p. 205).

Readers who do not have multiple personality, and who don’t know that many writers do, mistakenly think that such references to hearing voices are metaphors. But they are not metaphors. They describe the writer’s subjective experience of autonomous characters, narrators, alter egos, voice, inner critic, shadow, alternate personalities; call them what you will.

1. Sarah Hepola. Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2015.

Sarah Hepola’s Blackout: Since she reports “losing time” even when sober, her memory gaps may be like those seen in multiple personality, and not alcoholic

Ms. Hepola gives a long history of memory gaps for periods of time when she had been drunk but conscious, which certainly sounds like alcoholic blackouts. But to determine if these blackouts were truly alcoholic, it is important to know if she has also had memory gaps for periods of time that she has been sober. If she has, then the connection between alcohol and her blackouts may be coincidental.

In fact, she gives two examples of her having memory gaps when she is no longer drinking and is completely sober. If you read what she says too quickly or carelessly, you might think she is just giving examples of the saying, “Time flies when you are having fun.” But what she is trying to do is explain to us how great sobriety is, in that she can lose herself just as completely as she had when drinking, but now in a good way. She describes one episode as an example of “losing time” (a common expression in the multiple personality literature) and the other as showing how “pleasure shuts down the recorder in the brain.”

The first example is about her practicing the guitar. She says, “The afternoon could slip away when I was like this: three hours, gone without looking once at the clock. I loved being reminded that losing time didn’t have to be a nightmare. It could also be a natural high” (1, p. 211).

The other example is about a good sexual experience she had since being sober (in contrast to the bad sexual experiences she had had in her “alcoholic blackouts”): “The first time he and I had sex, I barely remembered it. The whole afternoon was white light and the dance of tree shadows through the windows. He kissed me on the couch, and then he kissed me on the stairs, and then I took him to my bed. And then time stopped…I always thought good sex without alcohol would be sharp with detail, saturated with color, but instead it was more like a 4 pm sun flare. Pleasure shuts down the recorder in the brain…For decades, I drank myself to reach that place of oblivion. Why hadn’t I known? The oblivion could come to me” (1, p. 197). 

1. Sarah Hepola. Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2015.

Nobel Prize novelist Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea:  The novel’s opening—saying the protagonist's “sudden transformations” must be explained—is totally forgotten

“Sudden Transformations”

The novel begins with the protagonist’s worry about his “sudden transformations.” For example, due to some kind of change that suddenly came over him, he left France and went to Indo-China, and then, after six years, he suddenly reverted to his regular self and returned to France.

He is trying to understand what is wrong with him, and is worried that he will have another “sudden transformation”:

“I have to admit that I am subject to these sudden transformations…That is what has given my life this halting, incoherent aspect. When I left France, for example, there were a lot of people who said I had gone off on a sudden impulse…

“And then, all of a sudden, I awoke from a sleep which had lasted six years…I couldn’t understand why I was in Indo-China. What was I doing there?…[And so he returned to France]…

“If I am not mistaken, and if all the signs which are piling up are indications of a fresh upheaval in my life, well then, I am frightened…I’m afraid of what is going to be born and take hold of me and carry me off—I wonder where? Shall I have to go away again…Shall I awake in a few months, a few years, exhausted, disappointed…I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late” (1, pp. 14-15).

Author Forgets Sudden Transformations

Amazingly, the rest of the novel makes no mention of sudden transformations. Instead, the protagonist’s problem becomes “nausea,” which eventually leads to his epiphany about existence (1, p. 182), “absurdity” (1, p. 185), and “contingency” (1, p. 188), and his discovery that he might prevent Nausea by becoming a novelist (1, pp. 245-246).

Multiple Personality

The protagonist is described at the beginning of the novel as having the two cardinal symptoms of multiple personality: personality switches and amnesia. And he did not have just the one six-year fugue. He says that he is prone to these sudden transformations, which are what has given his life its “halting, incoherent aspect.”

Author, Editor, Scholars, Reviewers

What can account for a novel that states the protagonist’s main problem at the beginning, then just forgets that problem, and talks about something else? Well, the author may have had multiple personality. But there is no good excuse for the editor, scholars, and reviewers.

1. Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea [1938]. London, Penguin Books, 2000.

David Lodge’s Therapy: Main character’s “absent-minded spells” are the regular personality’s amnesia for the times that an alternate personality came out

Laurence “Tubby” Passmore, a 58-year-old successful TV sitcom writer, has had surgery for his painful knee, but it didn’t help; has a wife who now wants a divorce; has already been having psychotherapy, acupuncture, and aromatherapy, but is still unhappy; and has lately become very interested in 19th century existentialist philosopher Kierkegaard (see recent posts), whose depression, romantic frustrations, and pseudonymous alter egos (alternate personalities) make him a kindred spirit.

This novel does not have any explicit reference to multiple personality. It has no part in the plot. And if Tubby has any symptom of multiple personality, it appears that David Lodge did not knowingly, intentionally, give it to him. (Search “gratuitous multiple personality” in the blog.)

However, Tubby does, indeed, have one of the cardinal symptoms of multiple personality—memory gaps—which occur in multiple personality when an alternate personality comes out for a period of time, and then the regular personality has amnesia for that period of time. In this novel, Tubby’s memory gaps are treated as a running joke: he sometimes doesn’t remember things that his wife, girlfriend, therapist, and lawyer say to him.

“ ‘But that’s what I just told you,’ [his wife said] and I realized I’d just had one of my absent-minded spells” (1, p. 33).

“Sally [his wife] just came into my study to tell me she wants a separation. She says she told me earlier this evening over supper, but I wasn’t listening” (1, p. 129).

“He did go and see his psychotherapist on Monday, but she doesn’t seem to have been much help. That may be Laurence’s fault, because when I [his platonic girlfriend friend Amy] asked him he couldn’t remember anything she’d said. I’m not sure he took in anything I said last night, either” (1, p. 141).

[Sally says] “This last year he’s been impossible to live with, completely wrapped up in himself, not listening to a word anybody says to him. Well, I suppose he must listen to his agent and his producer and so on, he could hardly function otherwise, but he didn’t listen to what I was saying to him” (1, pp. 192-193).

[He was meeting with his lawyer] “but I’m afraid my mind wandered and [he asked his lawyer to repeat what the lawyer had been saying]…‘Repeat how much?’ [his lawyer asked. But Tubby did not have any idea] “how long [the lawyer] had been speaking” (1, p. 219).

The novel treats these memory gaps as a running joke, and as possibly explained by narcissism and depression. But Tubby is not any more narcissistic than the other characters, and as his wife says, he is not so depressed that he doesn’t function well at his work and “listen to his agent and his producer and so on.”

On a trip to Copenhagen to do research about Kierkegaard, traveling with a “young, desirable” woman who “shamelessly offered me all the delights of her sumptuous body, I couldn’t take advantage of it…Call it conscience. Call it Kierkegaard…I think Kierkegaard is the thin man inside me that has been struggling to get out, and in Copenhagen he finally did” (1, p. 209).

There is nothing in the immediately surrounding text to indicate that he was concerned with his weight. He seems to be talking about an alternate personality, whom he has nicknamed “Kierkegaard,” who “has been struggling to get out,” and it just happens that the alternate personality has a thin body-image. Moreover, in the next paragraph, he brings up Kierkegaard’s “pseudonymous works” (1, p. 210), which, as discussed in a previous post, are manifestations of Kierkegaard’s multiple personality.

When Tubby says that he has “absent-minded spells,” it reminds me of past posts about Mark Twain’s “absent-mindedness” (search in blog). It is characteristic of multiple personality that a person will have both an excellent memory and remarkable, puzzling, lapses in memory—the memory gaps that one personality has for the times that another personality came out.

1. David Lodge. Therapy. New York, Viking Penguin, 1995.

Kierkegaard, the Novelist’s Philosopher (post 2): His Pseudonyms are the Autonomous Characters and Alternate Narrators of his Multiple Personality

“I suffer as a human being can suffer in indescribable melancholy, which always has to do with my thinking about my own existence…Only when I am producing do I feel well. Then I forget all life’s discomforts, all suffering, then I am absorbed in my thought and happy. If I let my work alone for a couple of days I immediately become ill, overwhelmed, troubled, my head heavy and burdened.” It was due to his melancholy, he tells us, that he “discovered and poetically traveled through a whole fantasy world.” His writing was not an agreeable amusement, but “the product of an irresistible inward impulse, a melancholy man’s only possibility…As Scheherazade saved her life by telling stories, so I save myself or keep myself alive by writing…

“…in the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine, I have no opinion about them except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them…My wish, my prayer, is that if it occur to anyone to cite a particular saying from the books, he do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonym…

“Each time I wish to say something, there is another who says it at the very same moment. It is as if I were always thinking double, as if my other self were always somehow ahead of me…” (1, pp. 135-151).

1. Josiah Thompson. Kierkegaard. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.

Walker Percy (post 2): What do novelists have in common with pseudonymous, existentialist, philosopher Soren Kierkegaard?

“…Soren Kierkegaard, perhaps the greatest single intellectual influence in his life…” (1, p. 174).

1. Jay Tolson. Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1992.

What interests me about Kierkegaard was his extensive use of pseudonyms. Did it indicate that he had multiple personality? Or was it just an early 19th century rhetorical device? Or both? Did his interest to novelists have anything to do with his use of pseudonyms and their relationship with multiple personality? (Search “pseudonyms” in this blog for previous discussions.)

According to Wikipedia:

“Kierkegaard [1813-1855] has also had a considerable influence on 20th-century literature. Figures deeply influenced by his work include W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Don DeLillo, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, David Lodge, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Rainer Maria Rilke, J.D. Salinger and John Updike…

“Kierkegaard's early work was written under various pseudonyms that he used to present distinctive viewpoints and to interact with each other in complex dialogue. He explored particularly complex problems from different viewpoints, each under a different pseudonym…

“Kierkegaard published some of his works using pseudonyms and for others he signed his own name as author…Pseudonyms were used often in the early 19th century as a means of representing viewpoints other than the author's own…

“Kierkegaard's most important pseudonyms, in chronological order, were:

Victor Eremita, editor of Either/Or

A, writer of many articles in Either/Or

Judge William, author of rebuttals to A in Either/Or

Johannes de silentio, author of Fear and Trembling

Constantine Constantius, author of the first half of Repetition

Young Man, author of the second half of Repetition

Vigilius Haufniensis, author of The Concept of Anxiety

Nicolaus Notabene, author of Prefaces

Hilarius Bookbinder, editor of Stages on Life's Way

Johannes Climacus, author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Inter et Inter, author of The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress

H.H., author of Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays

Anti-Climacus, author of The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity. “

Walker Percy’s Last Gentleman: Narrator’s nicknames for main character confirm that his dissociative amnesia and fugues are symptoms of multiple personality

As discussed in previous posts, memory gaps and fugues (described below) are core symptoms of multiple personality, especially when they are recurrent since childhood, and when they are obviously of a psychological nature. Memory gaps and fugues happen when some personalities do things that other personalities are not aware of.

The narrator and characters (including doctors) of this novel know that the main character has a long history of memory gaps and fugues, but, apparently, none of them has ever heard of multiple personality.

However, as discussed below, there are some things in the text that do suggest some type of an awareness by the author that his main character has multiple personality. 

“For some years he had had a nervous condition…As a child he had had ‘spells’…To be specific, he had now a nervous condition and suffered spells of amnesia…He had a way of turning up at unlikely places such as a bakery in Cincinnati or a greenhouse in Memphis…Most of this young man’s life was a gap. The summer before, he had fallen into a fugue state and wandered around northern Virginia for three weeks…hardly aware of his own name…He served two years in the United States Army, where he took a large number of courses in electronics and from which he was honorably and medically discharged when he was discovered totally amnesic and wandering about the Shenandoah Valley…he engaged a psychiatrist, whom he consulted for fifty-five minutes a day, five days a week, for the following five years…It is true that after several years of psychoanalysis and group therapy he had vastly improved his group skills. So thoroughly in fact did he identify with his group companions of the moment, so adept did he become at role-taking…There were times when he took roles so successfully that he left off being who he was and became someone else…” (1, pp. 10-20).

He was once “in the hospital—for three months…I had a nervous condition…an episode of amnesia…I didn’t know my own name, but I knew enough to put myself in the hospital” (1, p. 56).

There is no mention in this novel of multiple personality, per se, but a minor character, a novelist, is named “Mort Prince”: “He began to look forward to meeting Mort Prince. Some years ago he had read two of his novels and remembered them perfectly—he could remember perfectly every detail of a book he had read ten years ago or a conversation with his father fifteen years ago; it was the day before yesterday that gave him trouble” (1, p. 139).

In real life, Morton Prince (1854-1929) was an eminent psychiatrist whose patient, Christine Beauchamp, was a famous case of multiple personality, detailed in Prince’s book, The Dissociation of a Personality (1906).

Unreliable Narrator

Another of the novel’s passing references that seems too relevant to be purely accidental is when the main character passes some time by reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1, p. 183), a novel by Agatha Christie previously discussed in this blog. It is relevant for three reasons: First, Christie, herself, had a famous real-life fugue. Second, as previously discussed, she, herself, probably had multiple personality. Third, that particular novel of hers is famous for being a detective story with an unreliable narrator (which is normally a major violation of the rules of that genre). So, when the main character of Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman just happens to read that particular novel, it may be fair warning to the reader that this novel has an unreliable narrator, too.

The main character is a young American Southerner named Williston Bibb Barrett, usually called Will Barrett by the other characters. But the narrator almost never refers to him by his name. Most often, throughout the novel, the narrator refers to him simply as “the engineer”—in reference to a job he held at the beginning of the novel as a building maintenance engineer—or as “the engineer, who always told the exact truth” (1, p. 165). Occasionally, the narrator refers to him as an Englishman: “Tonight he was not American and horny but English and eavesdropper. He had to know without being known” (1, p. 170). “Englishman that he was, he awoke in his burrow without a commotion” (1, p. 205). “Another few seconds, and he was holed up as snug as an Englishman in Somerset” (1, p. 214).

Why doesn’t the narrator refer to Will Barrett by his name? Because the narrator apparently knows (but is not reliable and so doesn’t say) that the main character has multiple personality, and is, at any given time, one or another alternate personality. “The engineer” and the “Englishman” are two of Will Barrett’s alternate personalities.

Did Walker Percy know the relation of the name “Mort Prince” to a famous case of multiple personality? Did he know the implications of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? Did he know the implications of having a narrator who never refers to the main character as one whole person, Will Barrett, but only as aspects (alternate personalities) of the person, such as “the engineer” aspect and the “Englishman” aspect? (These two personalities would only be the tip of the iceberg.) I don’t know.

1. Walker Percy. The Last Gentleman. New York, Picador USA, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.