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.

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Friday, May 12, 2017

“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.
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