“In the Woods” by Tana French has two mysteries: Primary mystery is never solved, and protagonist’s multiple personality amnesia is never resolved.

“In the Woods is a 2007 mystery novel by Tana French…The novel won…the 2008 Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author, the 2008 Barry Award for Best First Novel, the 2008 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel, and the 2008 Anthony Award for Best First Novel.

Primary Mystery

“Twenty-two years prior to the novel's events, twelve-year-old Adam [Ryan] and his two best friends failed to come home after playing in the familiar woods bordering their Irish housing estate. A search is organized and the Guard finds Adam shivering, clawing the bark of a nearby tree, with blood on his shoes and slash marks on his back. He is unable to tell them what happened or where his friends are. They are never found and his amnesia holds to the present day. He now goes by his middle name, Rob [Ryan], to avoid media attention and is a detective with the Garda Síochána's Murder Squad.

Secondary Mystery

“The plot of the novel circles around the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, Katy Devlin, whose case Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox are assigned to investigate. The body is found in the same woods where Rob's friends disappeared, at an archaeological dig site, and the coincidence is enough to make Rob nervous, though he insists to his partner that he is fine…” (1).

Primary Mystery Never Solved,

12-year Amnesia Never Resolved

Not only is the mystery of what happened to Adam/Rob Ryan’s two childhood friends never solved, but Ryan’s amnesia for the first twelve years of his life is never resolved. He recovers bits of memory of what happened in the woods when he was twelve, but even most of that is fading away, since those memories “no longer seemed to belong to me” (2, p. 419).

An example of his amnesia was his visit to a church, which somehow evoked a vague sense of familiarity, but “It took me awhile to realize that this was, in fact, for good reason: I had attended Mass here every Sunday for twelve years…” (2, p. 139). That is, he knew it was the church of the community in which he knew he had lived for his first twelve years, but he didn’t actually remember it.

This is like the amnesia described by Frank Conroy in his memoir Stop Time, in which he knows that a certain apartment building is where he had lived as a child until age eight, but he can’t remember having lived there (see past post).

Multiple Personality Type of Amnesia

Only a person with multiple personality could have amnesia for the first twelve years of his life. It suggests that his current personality is not his original personality, but is an alternate personality that took over after he came out of the woods.

Are there any other examples of his having a type of amnesia seen in multiple personality? Yes, at one point he (as an adult) “went for long walks…wondering through the city for hours in something like a trance [until he finally found himself somewhere] with no idea how I got there” (2, p. 174). This is a dissociative fugue, often seen in multiple personality (search “fugue” in this blog).

Unacknowledged Multiple Personality

Although the protagonist of this novel has types of amnesia seen in multiple personality, multiple personality, per se, is never mentioned by any character or narrator. So why is unrecognized, apparently unintentional, multiple personality in this novel? It is an hypothesis of this blog’s Multiple Identity Literary Theory that unacknowledged multiple personality in a novel may reflect the author’s own psychology. (Search “gratuitous multiple personality” in this blog.)

1. "In the Woods.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Woods
2. Tana French. In the Woods. New York, Penguin Books, 2007.