Poet Walt Whitman’s novel “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle”: Author inadvertently portrays murderer as having multiple personality’s memory gaps.

Walt Whitman’s recently discovered novel was published anonymously in 1852, just three years before his Leaves of Grass. The two features relevant here are 1. the protagonist’s traumatic childhood, and 2. the inadvertent portrayal of a murderer as possibly having multiple personality.

Traumatic Childhood

The protagonist and first-person narrator, Jack Engle, was orphaned as a young child, and as a child, lived on the streets of New York City as a homeless vagabond. This can be seen as an easy way to gain sympathy for the character. And the way he became an orphan is integral to the plot. Nevertheless, since there are many other ways to gain sympathy and write plots, it suggests that the author had an interest in traumatic childhoods (which may be associated with multiple personality).

Murderer’s Memory

It is eventually discovered that Jack Engle became an orphan, because his father had been murdered. And Chapter XX contains a manuscript written by the murderer while he was in jail awaiting trial.

The murderer and Engle’s father had been childhood friends, and the latter had become the former’s employee when the murder takes place. For whatever reason, Engle’s father has been taunting his employer, who had a history of a nasty temper, and after one final taunt, the employer grabs a mallet from his employee’s hand and hits Engle’s father in the head, which kills him.

According to his manuscript, the murderer knows what he did—and he is not denying his guilt or asking for leniency—but certain things he says suggest that he may have learned the details of what he did from things others have said and not from his own direct memory of it.

For example, he says, “I hardly remember now with sufficient distinctness what passed…The ensuing few hours are like a hateful and confused dream to me. I was neither asleep nor awake…An awful blank seemed to spread through the mental part of me…” (1, pp. 136-137).

This raises the possibility that his history of a nasty temper was a history of times that a violent alternate personality had taken over. And that, in the recent murder, his regular personality had a memory gap for the period of time that his violent personality took over.

The question is why the narrative is raising these issues about memory. He is not denying his guilt or seeking leniency. The plot has nothing to do with multiple personality. The memory issues raised by the text are gratuitous and unwarranted.

Two possible explanations occur to me. Either Whitman was taking these memory issues from murder cases he had reported on or read about. Or memory gaps were something with which he was personally familiar.

1. Walt Whitman. Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography, a story of New York at the present time in which the reader will find some familiar characters [1852]. Introduction by Zachary Turpin. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017.