Jane Eyre (post 8): Jane gets suggestions from “the monitor”—Saul Bellow from the “commentator within”—only experienced by people with multiple personality

Near the end of Jane Eyre, Jane distinguishes between her own ideas and the suggestions she gets from “the monitor”:

     “ ‘My journey is closed,’ I thought to myself. I got out of the coach, gave a box I had into the ostler’s charge, to be kept till I called for it; paid my fair; satisfied the coachman, and was going: the brightening day gleamed on the sign of the inn, and I read in gilt letters, ‘The Rochester Arms.’ My heart leapt up: I was already on my master’s very lands. It fell again: the thought struck it:—

     ‘Your master himself may be beyond the British Channel, for aught you know: and then, if he is at Thornfield Hall, towards which you hasten, who besides him is there? His lunatic wife: and you have nothing to do with him: you dare not speak to him or seek his presence. You have lost your labour—you had better go no further,’ urged the monitor. ‘Ask information of the people at the inn; they can give you all you seek: they can solve your doubts at once. Go up to that man, and inquire if Mr. Rochester be at home.’

     The suggestion was sensible, and yet I could not force myself to act on it…” (1, p. 360).

In Saul Bellow’s 1966 Paris Review interview, he says:

“I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. There is such a commentator in me. I have to prepare the ground for him. From this source come words, phrases, syllables; sometimes only sounds, which I try to interpret, sometimes whole paragraphs, fully punctuated. When E. M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” he was perhaps referring to his own prompter…

“When I say the commentator is primitive, I don't mean that he's crude; God knows he's often fastidious. But he won't talk until the situation's right. And if you prepare the ground for him with too many difficulties underfoot, he won't say anything. I must be terribly given to fraud and deceit because I sometimes have great difficulty preparing a suitable ground. This is why I've had so much trouble with my last two novels. I appealed directly to my prompter. The prompter, however, has to find the occasion perfect—that is to say, truthful, and necessary. If there is any superfluity or inner falsehood in the preparations, he is aware of it…”

No, all people don’t have this. These personified, rational voices are the voices of alternate personalities. Only people with multiple personality may hear the voice of, and get suggestions from, a “monitor” or a “commentator within.”

1. Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. New York, W. W. Norton, 2001.