“Never Let Me Go” by Nobel Prize novelist Kazuo Ishiguro: Unintentional, unacknowledged, gratuitous multiple personality is implicit in two major characters.

The setting is the late 1990s, when for decades, even though Hitler hadn’t won the war, England has been raising human clones for vital spare parts (heart, etc.). Among the human clones are Kathy and Ruth.

Kathy Hears Voices

Kathy, the first-person narrator, is explaining that although she and the other clones, when they were children, may not have consciously understood what they were told about their fate (death from donating vital organs), there was a part of them who knew and spoke of it:

“All the same, some of it must go in somewhere. It must go in, because by the time a moment like that comes along, there’s a part of you that’s been waiting. Maybe from as early as when you’re five or six, there’s been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: ‘One day, maybe not so long from now, you’ll get to know how it feels’ ” (1, p. 36).

Here is another example: “A voice went: ‘All right, let him think the absolute worst. Let him think it, let him think it’ ” (1, p. 195).

Rational voices in nonpsychotic persons may be the voices of alternate personalities. The first quote above traces Kathy’s voices back to childhood, which is when multiple personality starts.

Kathy’s Mirror Metaphor

“It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange” (1, p. 36).

People with multiple personality may occasionally see an alternate personality when they look in the mirror (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog)—Jekyll looks in the mirror and sees Hyde—and a person who has had that kind of experience might use that kind of metaphor.

Kathy’s Trances and Dream States

“I did go around in a bit of a trance” (1, p. 58).

“Many of us had turned sixteen by then…In those days I had this secret game…To make this work, you had to get yourself into a sort of dream…” (1, p. 90).

Trance and dream states are more common in people with multiple personality.

Kathy’s four desklamps

“Here in my bedsit [rented room], I’ve got these four desklamps, each a different colour, but all the same design” (1, p. 208). For four alternate personalities?

“Two Quite Separate Ruths”

Kathy says, “I’d had this notion there were two quite separate Ruths. There was the Ruth who was always trying to impress the veterans [among their fellow clones], who wouldn’t hesitate to ignore me, Tommy, any of the others, if she thought we’d cramp her style. This was the Ruth I wasn’t pleased with…But the Ruth who sat beside me in my little attic room at the day’s close, legs outstretched over the edge of my mattress…and whatever had been happening during the day, I could just pick up with her where we’d left off the last time we’d sat together like that…” (1, p. 129).

Search “Twinkleton” in this blog for a post citing a Dickens character who had daytime and nighttime alternate personalities.

Ruth’s Memory Gaps

The distinction between hypocrisy and multiple personality is that a person with the latter has memory gaps, because one personality may not remember what happened when the other personality was in control. Dickens’s Miss Twinkleton had memory gaps. So the question is whether Ruth ever has memory gaps.

“And then there was the way Ruth kept pretending to forget things about Hailsham [the boarding school for clones that the characters had attended]. Okay, these were mostly trivial things, but I got more and more irritated with her…[Kathy gives examples, and concludes in exasperation] ‘Ruth, there’s no way you’ve forgotten. So don’t give me that’ ” (1, p. 189).

The very fact that these things were trivial, but of a nature that nobody would have forgotten, means that Ruth would have had no reason to lie about them, and evidently did have amnesia (memory gaps) for them.

Search “memory gaps” for the many past posts about it.

In conclusion, as discussed in many past posts, “gratuitous multiple personality” may reflect the psychological experience of the novelist.

1. Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go [2005]. New York, Vintage International, 2006.