“V.” by Thomas Pynchon (post 4): Fausto Maijstral, confessing to four personalities, differing in memory, calls it “false assumption that identity is single”

There is one other character who deserves mention in regard to multiple personality. But since this character does not think of it as multiple personality—a particular condition, with a clinical version known to psychiatry—he discusses it as though it were true of everyone.

In “Confessions of Fausto Maijstral” (chapter eleven), the character divides his life into four personalities, Fausto Maijstral I-IV. He says that each personality has its own memory, making memory unreliable, since it will differ depending on which personality you ask:

“Now memory is a traitor: gilding, altering. The word is, in sad fact, meaningless, based on the false assumption that identity is single, soul continuous” (1, p. 287).

However, identity is single for most people. They have different moods and roles, but their memory is continuous. Novelists and others who have the nonclinical version of multiple personality, but do not recognize it as such, may assume that everyone is multiple, but most people are not.

Although a sizable minority of people, some very gifted, do have the normal version of multiple personality—I estimate over 90% of novelists and up to 30% of the general public—most people, at least 70%, do not.

1. Thomas Pynchon. V. [1963]. New York, Bantam Books, 1984.