Iain Reid’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”: Female nameless narrator gets telephone messages from a male caller, but the calls originate from her own number.

If the author understood what he was writing about, and if he meant the ending to be a surprise, why does he reveal (page 23) and repeat (page 24) near the beginning of the novel that the telephone calls come from the protagonist’s own phone number? Since she lives alone, it could mean only one thing.

Readers of this blog would have an even earlier clue as to what was going on. Beginning on page one, the first-person narrator and protagonist is nameless. And there is only one psychological condition in which nameless personalities are common.

Also on page one is this very interesting question: “What if this thought wasn’t conceived by me but planted in my mind, predeveloped?” (The thought being referred to is the title and first line, “I’m thinking of ending things.”) In the history of psychiatry, the subjective experience that a thought was planted in your mind was once seen as a typical, psychotic symptom of schizophrenia. But it is now understood to be more common in multiple personality, when one personality puts a thought in the mind of another personality.

“What if this thought wasn’t conceived by me but planted in my mind, predeveloped?” may also be the author’s reflection on his writing process. I have quoted a number of writers in this blog—e.g., Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Sue Grafton—who say that they discover rather than create their stories, as if they were, somehow, predeveloped.

Iain Reid. I’m Thinking of Ending Things. New York, Scout Press/Simon & Schuster, 2016.