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.