“All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr (post 2): Character hears voice of alternate personality inside her, as do many people with multiple personality.

The characters in this novel go through a lot, but they do not change. Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who becomes blind as a child in the 1930s due to cataracts, by 2014 still has the same intellectual interests and has never had cataract surgery. Werner, the other main character, shows himself in the end to be the type of person the reader knew he was all along. Likewise, the ultimate fate of the diamond, hidden throughout most of this story (from the Nazis during WWII), is not revealed. So this novel is neither character-driven nor plot-driven—it is a situation-drama.

As noted in the previous post, the novel originated in the author’s feeling or image of a boy who was trapped, but who coped with this childhood trauma through his interest in radio. This is the exact situation of Werner.

Multiple personality is one way to psychologically cope with childhood trauma, and in novelists, there are two basic ways for it to be manifest in their novels. First, a character may have overt switches between personalities, either explicitly like Dostoevsky’s The Double or implicitly (and probably unintentionally) like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Second, a character may never overtly switch from one personality to another, but may hear voices of alternate personalities inside them. All the Light We Cannot See is of the latter kind.

For example, Marie-Laure converses with the voice of her absent (imprisoned or deceased) father (1, p. 376):

Don’t risk it, says the voice of her father. Don’t risk the noise.

Just one, Papa. I will save the other. The German is gone…

Why hasn’t the trip wire sprung?

Because he cut the wire. Or I slept through the bell…

Why would he leave when what he seeks is here?

Who knows what he seeks?

You know what he seeks [the diamond]…

Note that this dialogue, which continues for three times the above length, is not written like a girl who is simply imagining what her father might say. It is written like a dialogue with an alternate personality inside her—in real life multiple personality, alternate personalities are often active behind the scenes and heard as voices—which had been created in the image of her father to help her cope with the trauma of his absence.

The other main character, Werner, is also portrayed as having the tendency to create alternate personalities inside him—“doppelgängers” of people he knows:

“Werner thinks of her, whether he wishes to or not. Girl with a cane, girl in a gray dress, girl made of mist…She takes up residence inside him, a living doppelgänger…” (1, p. 423).

Since the author had not intended to raise the issue of multiple personality, why are these characters written as having subjective experiences that only people with multiple personality would have? Apparently, the author thinks of these kinds of experiences as ordinary psychology, which anybody might have. And why would he think that way unless such experiences were personally familiar to him?

1. Anthony Doerr. All the Light We Cannot See. New York, Scribner, 2014.