Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling) The Cuckoo’s Calling: Why does the novel unintentionally portray Cormoran Strike, the protagonist, as having multiple personality?

The following brief passages from the novel are a realistic description of how a person with multiple personality would feel the presence, and hear the voice, of an alternate personality:

“Through all these mundane acts, he felt as though he was accompanied by the specter that had haunted him during his months in hospital. It lurked in the corners of his shabby office; he could hear it whispering to him whenever his attention on the task in hand grew slack. It urged him to consider how far he had fallen; his age; his penury; his shattered love life; his homelessness. Thirty-five, it whispered, and nothing to show for all your years of graft except a few cardboard boxes and a massive debt. The specter directed his eyes to cans of beer in the supermarket, where he bought more Pot Noodles; it mocked him as he ironed shirts on the floor. As the day wore on, it jeered at him for his self-imposed habit of smoking outside in the street, as though he were still in the army, as though this petty self-discipline could impose form and order on the amorphous, disastrous present” (1, pp. 106-107).

“…a lucid voice in his mind urging him not to let desire lead on to humiliation…” (1, p. 351).

The question is why the author would describe the protagonist as having this kind of subjective experience, which only a person with multiple personality would have. After all, the author does not intend to portray him as having multiple personality. It has nothing to do with the plot of this detective novel. The portrayal of multiple personality, per se, quoted above, was unintended. It is gratuitous.

Novels have gratuitous multiple personality, because the author thinks that the subjective experience being described is an aspect of the ordinary psychology of most people. Why does that author think that? Because the author experiences it and takes it for granted.

1. Robert Galbraith (pseudonym of J. K. Rowling). The Cuckoo’s Calling. New York, Mulholland/Little Brown, 2013.