BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Saturday, August 6, 2016

When Certain Things in Novels Do Not Make Sense to Book Reviewers, Literary Critics, and Professors of Literature, What Should They Do About It?

If something in a novel makes no sense to you, what do you do about it?

It probably depends on whether you think the writer is legitimate; that is, whether the writer has won an award or other acclaim, or, at least, whether you think that some of the writing is obviously very good. If you do think the writer is legitimate, then when something makes no sense to you, you probably ignore or excuse it.

In the many novels discussed here, I have cited many examples of things that make no sense without the perspective of multiple personality that I have brought to it; for example, the signs and symptoms of multiple personality in the protagonist of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Those signs and symptoms were not understood by reviewers, but no reviewer mentions these things about the protagonist that they did not understand.

If the understanding of literature is to progress, readers must have the courage to acknowledge that certain things do not make sense to them.
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