“Regeneration Trilogy” by Pat Barker (post 5): Billy Prior has multiple personality memory gaps; Dr. Rivers worries Prior might get multiple personality.

In chapters ten and eleven of The Eye in the Door (second novel of The Regeneration Trilogy) (1), Billy Prior has the kind of memory gaps that is typically seen in multiple personality.

Prior went to lunch one day, but suddenly “He was back at his desk [at his office]. No interval. One second he was in the pub, the next sitting behind his desk…He couldn’t remember leaving the pub…Three hours had passed since he broke for lunch, and of that he could account for perhaps twenty to twenty-five minutes. The rest was blank” (1, p. 314).

“Shortly after six he thought he recognized voices, and went out of his [office] and a little way along the corridor. Major Lode [Prior’s boss] and Lionel Spragge were deep in conversation by the lifts…[Lode comes to Prior’s office and says,] “Just seen Spragge…Says you offered him a job.” Prior replies, “I didn’t offer him anything.” Lode says, “Well, he certainly seems to think you did” (1, pp. 314-315).

The reader knows that Prior had been conducting an investigation in which he wanted to get in contact with Spragge, so it makes sense that Prior would have contacted Spragge, possibly during the three hours of Prior’s memory gap.

That evening, Prior feels like taking a walk to the Achilles Monument. When he gets there, Spragge is waiting for him, but Prior pays no attention and starts to walk away. Spragge stops him and “tapped his watch. ‘Achilles. Nine o’clock’ ” (1, p. 318), quoting the appointment that Prior had made to meet him. But Prior can’t remember making any such appointment. However, back in his apartment, based on circumstantial evidence, Prior reasons that he must have “made the appointment all right. God knows when, or why” (1, p. 320).

At his next psychotherapy session with Dr. Rivers, Prior reports that he has had seven episodes of memory gaps, lasting from twenty minutes to three hours (1, p. 320).

In considering this session with Prior, Dr. Rivers thinks that “There was one genuinely disturbing feature of the case: that odd business of making an appointment in the fugue state and keeping it in the normal state. It suggested the fugue state was capable of influencing Prior’s behaviour even when it was not present, in other words, that it was functioning as a co-consciousness. Not that a dual personality need develop even from that. He intended to make sure it didn’t. There would be no hypnosis…no encouraging Prior to think of the fugue state as an alternative self” (1, p. 328).

Incidentally, during that same psychotherapy session, Prior confronts Dr. Rivers with Dr. Rivers’ own symptoms, which date back to a possible traumatic event when Rivers was five years old. Rivers acknowledges to himself that “It was almost as if the experience — whatever it was — had triggered an attempt at dissociation of personality [which is what multiple personality is], though…not a successful one. Still, he had been, throughout most of his life, a deeply divided man…” (1, p. 327).

Comment

There are several mistakes regarding fugues and multiple personality. The classic fugue: Following a traumatic event, a person forgets who he is and travels away from where people know him. He may soon remember who he is and resume his previous life, or, in the most dramatic cases, he may start a new life under a new name at the new location.

But Billy Prior never forgets who he is, travels elsewhere, etc. On the contrary, whatever he does during the time of his memory gaps, he goes by his regular name, and is accepted as himself by people who know him. And this is what commonly happens in multiple personality: The person switches to an alternate personality, but the alternate personality remains incognito, in that he answers to the person’s regular name, and so other people don’t realize the switch has taken place. But when the regular personality resumes control, he has a memory gap for the period of time that the alternate personality had taken over. So Prior’s scenario is not that of a fugue, per se, but of multiple personality.

The episode in which Prior’s regular personality meets Spragge at a time and place that Prior’s alternate personality had evidently arranged is unrealistic. Even if it were the regular personality who arrived for the appointment (influenced by the alternate personality’s giving him the impulse to do so), as soon as Prior met Spragge, the alternate personality would have taken over, and conducted whatever business he had with Spragge, later leaving the regular personality with a memory gap for the meeting.

It is also clinically unrealistic (or at least very unusual) for an adult patient to complain to his therapist of having memory gaps. If most persons with multiple personality complained about their memory gaps, the diagnosis would not be missed so frequently. The reason that most persons with multiple personality do not complain about their memory gaps is that they have been having memory gaps since childhood, and it is something they have learned to live with and ignore.

Dr. River’s fear of using hypnosis is misplaced, if for no other reason than that it is unnecessary to use hypnosis to meet alternate personalities. In past posts, I have given clinical examples of one person who had found poems she didn’t recall writing, among her personal papers (which had evidently been written during memory gaps) and another person who found a green coat in her closet, which she had no memory of getting. While you could use hypnosis to put the host personality “asleep” and meet the alternate personality who wrote the poems or had gotten the green coat, I did not. All I had to do was persist in discussing the poems or the green coat, and eventually the alternate personalities who knew about these things took over and told me about themselves and what they knew, much of which could later be corroborated.

I am only halfway through the trilogy. Perhaps Dr. Rivers will do better in regard to multiple personality in the second half.

1. Pat Barker. The Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration [1991], The Eye in the Door [1993], The Ghost Road [1995]. London, Viking/Penguin, 1996.

“Regeneration Trilogy” by Pat Barker (post 4): Book One ends with the war hero/anti-war poet headed back to war. Book Two’s epigraph cites “duality of man”

The first book of this trilogy has the psychotherapeutic relationship between Dr. Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon as its main focus. Rivers closes his file on Sassoon, and the first book, with “Nov. 26, 1917. Discharged to duty.” Sassoon, who is both a gung-ho war hero and an anti-war poet, will return to battle at his own request.

“How on earth was Siegfried going to manage in France? His opposition to the war had not changed. If anything it had hardened. And to go back to fight, believing as he did, would be to encounter internal divisions far deeper than anything he’d experienced before” (1, p. 219).

The second book of the trilogy begins with an epigraph on the “duality of man” from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Thus, as the above and previous posts suggest, there will likely be overt multiple personality in the second and/or third books of this trilogy. Whether it will be acknowledged and labelled as multiple personality, or glossed over as the “duality of man,” I don’t know.

Dr. Rivers has not, so far, had any thoughts of, or shown any knowledge of, multiple personality. Although amnesia is one of the common symptoms he sees in his patients with “shell shock” (posttraumatic stress disorder, PTSD), he has not pursued this symptom as a possible clue to multiple personality (search “memory gaps”), which is the way most cases of multiple personality are diagnosed.

So when multiple personality is seen later in this trilogy, it will likely become overt, not due to intentional, diagnostic evaluation for it, but in a crisis and of its own accord. And since, in a person who has lifelong multiple personality, it becomes recognizably overt of its own accord (by, for example, acknowledging a different name) only on rare occasions, it is often mistaken for a transient event. But this author should not make that mistake, because, as quoted in a previous post, she based the multiple personality symptoms of one of her characters on a real-life case of an adult who had multiple personality since childhood.

1. Pat Barker. The Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration [1991], The Eye in the Door [1993], The Ghost Road [1995]. London, Viking/Penguin, 1996.

“Regeneration Trilogy” by Pat Barker (post 3): Mr. Sassoon, war hero and anti-war poet, is “three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways.”

I have just started the trilogy, and whether or not the author thinks of it in terms of multiple personality, per se, it looks like it may turn out to be her psychological theme.

In the military psychiatric hospital during WWI, one historical character, Dr. Rivers (1), interviews another historical character, Siegfried Sassoon, who is both a war hero “nicknamed ‘Mad Jack’ by his men for his near-suicidal exploits” and an anti-war poet (2).

In an initial interview, Rivers asks Sassoon about his background, and at one point Sassoon says, “It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways” (3, p. 33).

Dr. Rivers does not stop to explore the psychological implications of the above statement, but I am interested.

1. Wikipedia. “W. H. R. Rivers.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._R._Rivers

2. Wikipedia. “Siegfried Sassoon.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon

3. Pat Barker. The Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration [1991], The Eye in the Door [1993], The Ghost Road [1995]. London, Viking/Penguin, 1996.

“Regeneration Trilogy” by Pat Barker (post 2): Do author and other scholars know that a person with an “alternative personality” has multiple personality?

In my previous post, Pat Barker is quoted as saying that the behavior of one of her major fictional characters in The Regeneration Trilogy is based on a real person who had had an “alternative personality” since childhood.

Do the author, the interviewer, and the book’s editors know that having an alternative personality since childhood means having multiple personality, and that if the behavior of a character is based on such a person, then the character has multiple personality, too?

Judging from the index of the book, they may not know it. The index does make reference to psychiatric diagnoses—“post-traumatic stress disorder” and “hysteria”—but not to multiple personality (1).

1. Sharon Monteith, Margaretta Jolly, Nahem Yousaf, Ronald Paul (Editors). Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker. University of South Carolina Press, 2005.

“Regeneration Trilogy” by Booker Prize winner Pat Barker: Author says divided state of Billy Prior is based on Vietnam War veteran with multiple personality.

Regeneration Trilogy

“Regeneration is a historical…novel by Pat Barker, first published in 1991… It is the first of three novels in the Regeneration Trilogy of novels on the First World War, the other two being The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road which won the Booker Prize in 1995…

“The novel explores the experience of British army officers being treated for shell shock during World War I…Barker draws extensively on first person narratives from the period. Using these sources, she created characters based on historical individuals…including poets and patients, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, who pioneered treatments of posttraumatic stress disorder during and after World War I…Barker also includes fictional characters…including…Billy Prior…” (1)

“Prior…is an intelligent, deeply cynical soldier whom we first meet recovering from shell shock...At the beginning of Regeneration he is temporarily mute, having found the detached eye of a dead comrade in the trenches, and mainly communicates through writing with pen and paper. However, he eventually overcomes this through counselling with Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, the historical psychologist who features prominently in all three novels. His relationship with Rivers is problematic and sometimes argumentative. During the trilogy they are at odds over class difference (Billy comes from working class origins), Prior's sardonic treatment of the hospital staff, and Rivers's own moral misgivings about the war…In the first novel of the series we learn that Prior was emotionally abused by his father, an abrasive wife-beater, an experience that also helped shape the man he would become. Nahem Yousaf and Sharon Monteith called Prior ‘the mobilizing force in the trilogy; not only does he experience the war in phases, his chameleonlike character also facilitates shifts in perspective.’ ” (2).

Based on Real-Life Multiple Personality

Pat Barker says, “The extreme divided state Prior experiences in The Eye in the Door is actually based on a Vietnam War veteran, who, in the other state, the alternative personality, had very striking anesthesia over a very large part of his body…And that state went back into his childhood. He was black, and he’d been attacked in his neighborhood by a gang of white youths, all of whom were much bigger than he was, and there was no way he was going to win or survive without a beating. This other personality came and took over and took the pain. Ever since then, but particularly in Vietnam, when he was frightened or in danger or faced with physical pain, he would go into this other state, which was extremely violent” (3, p. 184).

1. Wikipedia. “Regeneration (novel).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_(novel)

2. Wikipedia. “Billy Prior.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Prior

3. Sheryl Stevenson. “With the Listener In Mind: Talking about the Regeneration Trilogy with Pat Barker,” pp. 175-184, in Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker, Edited by Sharon Monteith, Margaretta Jolly, Nahem Yousaf, Ronald Paul. University of South Carolina Press, 2005.

“Catch-22” and “Something Happened” by Joseph Heller (post 5): In his second novel, Joseph Heller showed even more interest in multiple personality. 

According to his biographer, Joseph Heller was “fascinated” with schizophrenia in Catch-22 (1961), and was even more fascinated with it by the time he wrote his second novel, Something Happened (1974). But Heller’s description of the protagonist of Something Happened would seem to indicate that he was not talking about schizophrenia, but about multiple personality:

In the years following publication of Catch-22, “Joe [Heller] would grow fascinated with…schizophrenia…In developing themes for his second novel [Something Happened], Joe would work consciously with the concept of schizophrenia, but this first book [Catch-22] had plenty of examples of it” (1, p. 228).

In Something Happened, “Slocum shows ‘signs that, I believe, are clinical symptoms of psychosis or schizophrenia,’ Joe [Heller] said of his main character. ‘[H]e’s saying, There’s somebody inside me who wants to do these things I’m ashamed of…Then he has to create a third [personality], to supervise the other two. Then a fourth one that’s watching everything…’ ” (1, p. 331).

What apparently had led Heller to confuse multiple personality with schizophrenia was an old, now totally discredited theory of schizophrenia, which said that it was caused by a “schizophrenogenic” mother’s mixed messages, which created a “double bind” (which Heller renamed, “Catch-22”).

“The Double Bind Theory was first articulated in relationship to schizophrenia, but [Gregory] Bateson and his colleagues hypothesized that schizophrenic thinking was not necessarily an inborn mental disorder but a learned confusion in thinking. It is helpful to remember the context in which these ideas were developed. Bateson and his colleagues were working in the Veteran's Administration Hospital (1949–1962) with World War II veterans. As soldiers they'd been able to function well in combat, but the effects of life-threatening stress had affected them. At that time, 18 years before Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was officially recognized, the veterans had been saddled with the catch-all diagnosis of schizophrenia” (2).

“Double Bind” and “Catch-22” are about contradictions, a cardinal feature of multiple personality, in which one person may have two or more personalities who contradict each other in values, behavior, emotions, etc.

1. Tracy Daugherty. Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2011.

2. Wikipedia. “Double Bind.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind

“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller (post 4): Soon after two other characters had displayed symptoms of multiple personality, the protagonist is given that diagnosis.

Yossarian, the protagonist, an American WWII bombardier, is wounded by antiaircraft fire and hospitalized. He had bled profusely from the flesh wound of his upper thigh, but he is stitched up and recovering nicely.

Yossarian and another patient switch beds, so that when the psychiatrist comes around, Yossarian is in a bed that has another soldier’s name. And when Yossarian claims to be “Yossarian,” a name that does not correspond to the name on his bed, the psychiatrist jumps to the conclusion that he has “a split personality” (1, p. 299).

I don’t know if this joke about Yossarian’s having multiple personality will be followed up in any way in the rest of the novel, but with its coming so soon after the two other characters had been given symptoms of multiple personality (see previous post), it would seem that the issue was on the author’s mind.

1. Joseph Heller. Catch-22 [1961]. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011.

“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller (post 3): Colonel Cathcart and General Dreedle have memory gaps and self-contradictions typical of multiple personality.

Colonel Cathcart addresses the chaplain:

“Corporal Whitcomb tells me you took a plum tomato when you were in here this morning.”

     “This morning? But, sir! You gave it to me.”

     Colonel Cathcart cocked his head with suspicion. “I didn’t say I didn’t give it to you, did I? I merely said you took it…Did I give it to you?”

     “Yes, sir. I swear you did.”

     “Then I’ll just have to take your word for it. Although I can’t imagine why I’d want to give you a plum tomato” (1, p. 282).

General Dreedle addresses Colonel Cathcart:

     “Well, I’ll be damned,” General Dreedle had exclaimed hoarsely, his shaggy gray menacing eyebrows beetling in recognition. “Is that a chaplain I see over there? That’s really a fine thing when a man of God begins hanging around a place like this [the officers’ club] with a bunch of dirty drunks and gamblers.”

     Colonel Cathcart compressed his lips primly and started to rise. “I couldn’t agree with you more, sir,” he assented briskly in a tone of ostentatious disapproval. “I just don’t know what’s happening to the clergy these days.”

     “They’re getting better, that’s what’s happening to them,” General Dreedle growled emphatically.

     Colonel Cathcart gulped awkwardly and made a nimble recovery. “Yes, sir. They are getting better. That’s exactly what I had in mind, sir.”

     “This is just the place for a chaplain to be, mingling with the men while they’re out drinking and gambling so he can get to understand them and win their confidence. How the hell else is he ever going to get them to believe in God?” (1, p. 283).

     “That’s a fine thing,” General Dreedle growled at the bar, gripping his empty shot glass in his burly hand. “That’s really a fine thing. When a man of God begins hanging around a place like this with a bunch of dirty drunks and gamblers…

     “If he wasn’t a chaplain,” General Dreedle muttered, “I’d have him taken outside and shot” (1, p. 284).

Comment

There is no ordinary reason for Colonel Cathcart to have forgotten that he had given the tomato to the chaplain. Even after the chaplain reminds him of it, he not only does not remember it, but considers the act something that he would never have done. This is typical of one personality’s memory gap for, and lack of identification with, the behavior of another personality.

General Dreedle switches back and forth between two personalities, which hold opposite opinions. And he does not remember (memory gap) having just expressed the opposite opinion.

These are good examples of what I have termed “gratuitous multiple personality,” which means signs and symptoms of multiple personality that don’t appear to have been put in the text to raise the issue of multiple personality, per se. The author evidently considered memory gaps and self-contradiction to be aspects of ordinary psychology, possibly because it was a more or less ordinary aspect of his own psychology.

In real life, a person with multiple personality would not admit that he didn’t remember, and/or identify with, witnessed behavior (unless he could put the blame on drugs or alcohol). He would pretend that he did remember it and/or quickly change the subject. If the person he was talking to chose to confront him with his contradictory behavior, he would either act offended or claim he was joking, and then change the subject. In short, people with multiple personality become quite adept at talking their way out of such awkward situations.

1. Joseph Heller. Catch-22 [1961]. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011.

“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller (post 2): Author says that virtually none of the attitudes in the novel are based on his experiences as bombardier in World War II.

Pausing halfway through my 50th anniversary edition to read the appendix, I find the following reflections by the author:

“The concept of the novel came to me as a seizure, a single inspiration…My mind flooded with verbal images…I don’t know were it came from…the unconscious element was very strong…I deliberately looked for contradictory situations…Catch-22 became a law: ‘they’ can do anything to us we can’t stop ‘them’ from doing…

“Virtually none of the attitudes in the book—the suspicion and distrust of the officials in the government, the feelings of helplessness and victimization, the realization that most government agencies would lie—coincided with my experiences as a bombardier in World War II…

“It is the anonymous ‘they,’ the enigmatic ‘they,’ who are in charge. Who is ‘they’? I don’t know…” (1).

1. Joseph Heller. “Reeling in Catch-22.” From The Sixties, ed. Lynda Rosen Obst (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1977, pp. 50, 52). Reprinted in appendix of Joseph Heller. Catch-22 [1961]. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011, pp. 474-476.

If, as Alison Gopnik says, “4-Year-Olds Don’t Act Like Trump,” then perhaps he acts like pseudo-child alternate personalities common in multiple personality.

For the sake of discussion, I will assume that Prof. Gopnik does not present an overly idealized view of children in her New York Times article (1). She implies that New York Times columnists and others have been mistaken to compare some of President Trump’s behavior to that of real children.

But that raises the question of whether Trump’s behavior is like some sort of unreal children.

Unreal children are commonly found in adults with multiple personality. The most common kind of alternate personality is the child-aged alter, because multiple personality starts in childhood.

According to DSM-5 (the psychiatric diagnostic manual), clinical multiple personality (a nonpsychotic, dissociative disorder) is more common than schizophrenia (a well-known psychosis). I argue in this blog that a normal version of multiple personality is probably present in 90% of novelists, and possibly 30% of the general public. And as previously discussed, the latter might include Trump.

1. Alison Gopnik. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/opinion/sunday/4-year-olds-children-trump-gopnik.html

Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Rooster” and “Happy Chicken”: Two very different versions of her life at age five, the latter narrated not by Oates, but by the chicken.

Persons with multiple personality may give multiple versions of their own lives, because some personalities have memory gaps (dissociative amnesia) for things that other personalities remember, and each personality has its own point of view.

The version given in “The Rooster Attacked Me — and Yet I Loved Him” (1) is very different from the version given in “Happy Chicken 1942-1944,” the second chapter of Oates’s memoir, The Lost Landscape (2).

The “Happy Chicken” chapter, both very funny and very psychologically complex, should be read in the original, but here is my brief note from a past post (search “Oates”):

Dissociative Amnesia at Age Five

The chapter “Happy Chicken” has a different narrator from most of the memoir. Here, Joyce Carol Oates is usually referred to by the narrator as “the little girl.” When the little girl was five years old, she was allowed to help “the Grandmother” collect eggs on their family farm. The narrator says:

“Grandma was the one, you know. The one who killed the chickens.

No! I did not know.

Of course you must have known, Joyce. You must have seen—many times…

No. I didn’t know. I never saw.

But…

I never saw” (2, p. 27).

“Sometime the little girl was breathless and frightened but why, the little girl would not afterward recall” (2, p. 29).

This alternate narrator—in the rhetorical, humorous guise of Joyce’s pet chicken, Happy Chicken—may be an alternate personality who knew things that little Joyce did not want to remember, like who killed the cute, innocent chickens on their family farm.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/magazine/the-rooster-attacked-me-and-yet-i-loved-him.html

2. Joyce Carol Oates. The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age. New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2015.

“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller: On the same page “Catch-22” is defined, it is mentioned, in passing, that everyone has lied to the protagonist his whole life.

I just started reading Catch-22. The protagonist, Yossarian, who flies air-combat missions in WWII, is told that you can ask to be excused from flying these dangerous missions if you claim to have gone crazy. But the catch—“Catch-22”—is that asking to be excused from flying these suicidal missions proves that you are not crazy.

At the bottom of the same page is the following, mentioned in passing: “…Yossarian’s mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, in-law, teacher, spiritual leader, legislator, neighbor and newspaper, had…lied to him about anything crucial…” (1, p. 46).

Thus, in fact, or at least in Yossarian’s opinion, the lying in his military life is a continuation of the lying by everyone in his civilian life. People have lied to Yossarian his whole life.

Truth is often spoken as if in jest. However, as I just started this novel, I don’t yet know what truth, if any, is behind these jests.

1. Joseph Heller. Catch-22 [1961]. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger says “Discontinuity defines the Trump personality”; it also defines dissociative identity (multiple personality).

“Discontinuity defines the Trump personality, and this won’t change” (1).

Multiple personality “…involves marked discontinuity…Most individuals with…dissociative identity disorder do not overtly display their…[alternate personalities]..for long periods of time…When alternate identity states are not directly observed, the disorder can be identified by…discontinuities…” (2, pp. 292-293).

1. Daniel Henninger. “Let Trump Be Trump.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/let-trump-be-trump-1495061454
2. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

New York Times columnist David Brooks says Trump is improving: In January he said President is like a “5-year-old,” but now says he is like a “7-year-old.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/trump-classified-data.html

However, Brooks does not explain how such a childlike person could run a billion-dollar business and become President.

Maybe Trump also has adult personalities.

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 7): The title expresses contempt for Gatsby as being an alternate personality who will be killed off.

“It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over” (1, p. 113).

Fitzgerald thought of Gatsby as Trimalchio.

Who is Trimalchio? The fictional character “Trimalchio is an arrogant former slave, who has become quite wealthy by tactics that most would find distasteful…The term ‘Trimalchio’ has become shorthand for the worst excesses of the nouveau riche” (2).

Fitzgerald had “preferred titles referencing Trimalchio…but was eventually persuaded that the reference was too obscure and that people would not be able to pronounce it. His wife, Zelda, and [his editor] Perkins both expressed their preference for The Great Gatsby” (3).

However, “The Great Gatsby,” while more marketable, still expresses contempt for the character, since the truly great people in history almost always have “the great” following their names—e.g., Alexander the Great (4)—whereas pretentious entertainers are called “the great” this or “the great” that. 

To understand this novel, you must keep in mind that the original person is James Gatz (see prior post). “Jay Gatsby” is an alternate personality, whose time to be out and in control has come and gone.

In multiple personality, alternate personalities may think of their having control taken away from them and their being forced to go back inside as being killed off, so to speak. The novel translates this into ordinary terms when Jay Gatsby is literally killed off at the end.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby [1925]. New York, Scribner, 2004.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimalchio

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_known_as_the_Great

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 6): When the title character is referred to in quotation marks, it implies that he is only an alternate personality.

In the rest of the novel, there is one point at which the title character is referred to in quotation marks:

“It was this night [after Daisy had driven a car that hit and killed her husband Tom’s mistress] that he [Gatsby] told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody [when Gatz changed his name to Gatsby]—told it to me because ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out. I think that he would have acknowledged anything now, without reserve, but he wanted to talk about Daisy [the woman Gatsby loves]” (1, p. 148).

With those quotation marks, does the author acknowledge that “Jay Gatsby” is only an alternate personality whose time in control had come to an end and was played out? Inadvertently.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby [1925]. New York, Scribner, 2004.

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 5): At seventeen, James Gatz’s alternate personality, Jay Gatsby, previously behind the scenes, takes over.

“James Gatz of North Dakota…was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen…I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents…unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all…So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end” (1, p. 98).

Multiple personality starts in childhood, and as the narrator says, “Gatsby” had probably first arisen in Gatz’s imagination long before age seventeen, as an alternate identity who was not the child of unsuccessful parents. But it was not until age seventeen that Jay Gatsby, James Gatz’s alternate personality, took over.

A psychological explanation is most likely, because the name change has no socioeconomic advantage. If his family name had been Rocke, and he had changed it to Rockefeller, then that might have been a rational scheme. But the change from Gatz to Gatsby is socially meaningless. Any person from a rich family knows that there is no rich family by that name, and infers that Gatsby’s sudden riches must be based on criminal activity such as bootlegging.

Is there any other psychological explanation? Why not just say that James Gatz wanted a fresh start? But the American dream is rags to riches, or in the political arena, from the log cabin to the White House. A man is proud to be the first successful one in his family.

So why does F. Scott Fitzgerald include the Gatz to Gatsby name change? Does he want to raise the issue of multiple personality? If he doesn’t, then it is an example of what I call “gratuitous multiple personality”: the only reason it is in the novel is that it reflect’s the author’s own psychology.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby [1925]. New York, Scribner, 2004.

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 4): In first third of novel, Gatsby illustrates kinds of lying and changes in demeanor seen in multiple personality.

The three prior posts (search “Fitzgerald”) discussed his novel, Tender is the Night, and this Fitzgerald quote: “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, the first-person narrator, comparing himself to other characters, says, “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (1, p. 59). Since I have not yet finished the novel, I don’t know if Nick will turn out to be reliable, but other characters, such as Jay Gatsby, are certainly introduced as great liars.

Before Gatsby is introduced, the reader is told how all the people who attend his extravagant parties speculate about him—How did he get to be so rich? What is his background? Etc.—but nobody seems to know, and the rumors about him are inconsistent and contradictory. Has Gatsby kept his background secret? Or has he told different things to different people?

Gatsby says to Nick:

“Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life…I don’t want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear…I’ll tell you God’s honest truth…I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West—all dead now…

“What part of the Middle West?” I inquired casually.

“San Francisco.”

“I see.”

Gatsby goes on and on, saying things more and more extraordinary, until the narrator thinks, “My incredulity was submerged in fascination now…” (1, pp. 65-66).

The only thing I know for sure about what Gatsby says is that San Francisco is in California on the west coast, not in the Middle West. And the question is why Gatsby would say something so obviously untrue. This is not an ordinary lie.

Lying in Multiple Personality

Most people with multiple personality do not intentionally lie any more than the average person. But they may get a reputation as a liar 1) when they deny having done something that other people have seen them do, because the host personality has a memory gap for what an alternate personality did, or 2) when different personalities, who have different beliefs about what is true—and some personalities may have rather fanciful beliefs—tell fanciful or contradictory things to various people or to the same person at different times.

Search “lying” for previous discussions related to other writers.

Gatsby may have something to hide. Perhaps he got rich from crime. But only in the alternate reality of an alternate personality could San Francisco be in the Middle West.

Abrupt Change in Demeanor

“He [Gatsby] smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life…It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck…” (1, p. 48).

Now, it is true that when the above was going on, “a butler had hurried toward him [Gatsby] with the information that Chicago was calling.” And perhaps Gatsby had criminal connections in Chicago, which might explain his switch from empathic to roughneck. But the above passage does not portray him as a hypocrite, who is only pretending to be extraordinarily empathic, but who is really a roughneck. No, he appears to be genuinely both: first one, then the other, switching suddenly from one to the other, like a person with multiple personality.

Perhaps, you may think, the above is not an example of multiple personality, but of a con man. But what makes a good con man? Search “confidence man” in this blog for a discussion of multiple personality in two novels with “confidence man” in their titles.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby [1925]. New York, Scribner, 2004.

4th Anniversary of Literary-Psychological blog, whose essays provide evidence that most novelists, many others, have normal version of multiple personality.

This blog has nearly a thousand posts (really, brief essays) on 1) more than a hundred novelists, and 2) multiple personality. These essays help explain how fiction writers write, and how you can recognize multiple personality in people and novels, in spite of the fact that it is usually not labelled as such.

I estimate that about ninety percent of fiction writers and thirty percent of the general public have a normal version of multiple personality.

Old View

For hundreds if not thousands of years, there has been a common view that normal people often have more than one self—e.g., a good self and a bad self—with one or the other self in control at any given time, depending on various factors. It has also been a common view that certain abnormal people have been possessed by demons or controlled by alternate personalities. 

The selves of normal people and the alternate personalities of mentally ill people have usually been thought of as unrelated.

My View

In my view, only a minority of normal people (no more than thirty percent) have more than one self in any meaningful sense, but these selves are essentially the same as alternate personalities. It is just that normal people don’t have sufficient distress and dysfunction to warrant exorcism or a diagnosis. Indeed, without the distress and dysfunction, multiple personality may be an asset; for example, in writing novels.

State of the Blog

The blog continues to be visited from around the world, but since no one submits comments, I do not know what anyone thinks.

Harvard Review of Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality): Not Fad, Not Cultural, Not Rare, Not Iatrogenic, Not Borderline, Not Temporary.

Harvard Review of Psychiatry. 2016 July; 24(4): 257-270.

“Separating Fact from Fiction: An Empirical Examination of Six Myths About Dissociative Identity Disorder”

Bethany L. Brand, PhD, Vedat Sar, MD, et al.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4959824/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4959824/pdf/hvp-24-257.pdf

“The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger (post 3): Holden Caulfield, not “crazy” or “mad”—such terms are meaningless—says “People never notice anything.”

Holden frequently calls himself “crazy” and “mad.” On the first page, he says, “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff” (1, p. 3). On the last page, he says, “I don’t know what to think about it” (1, p. 234). One reason that Holden and most literary critics don’t know what to think about his “madman stuff” is that they use terms like “crazy” and “mad,” which do not refer to any specific mental condition.

Holden is inexplicably changeable and emotional. He has a prodigious memory for small details, but memory gaps in certain instances. He is a self-confessed liar, often for no personal gain, sometimes almost believing his own lies, which are more like fantasies than psychotic delusions. He occasionally feels like he is fading out of existence. He does things and feels things he can’t explain. He is not paranoid or incoherent. He recognizes that things he does and feels are peculiar and puzzling.

The above is not a description of schizophrenia or psychosis. It is consistent with multiple personality’s changeableness, personality switches, memory gaps, lying, and alternate personalities’ pulling the emotional and behavioral strings of the host personality from behind the scenes.

I will conclude with a comment that Holden makes (but it may not be regular old Holden): “People never notice anything” (1, p. 12). This is a common thought of alternate personalities. They like to remain incognito—by answering to the person’s regular name and pretending to be the host personality—but are continually surprised that this works, because most alternate personalities see themselves as looking quite different from the host personality, and they can’t understand why people never notice.

1. J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye [1951]. New York, Little Brown, 2014.