“V.” by Thomas Pynchon (post 2): Esther reads “Bridey Murphy” before, and has fugue after, rhinoplasty, by surgeon with history of fugue and memory gap.

The next chapter, titled “In which Esther gets a nose job,” begins with Esther’s reading, on the way to her plastic surgeon, The Search for Bridey Murphy, a 1956 book about a woman who was hypnotized, and whose past life as a woman named Bridey Murphy was allegedly discovered.

It was eventually found that “Bridey Murphy” was the hypnotized woman’s alternate personality, based on stories she had been told in early childhood. So this chapter opens with reference to an example of multiple personality.

Later in the chapter, the backstory about how Dr. Schoenmaker had been inspired to become a plastic surgeon, which involved his witnessing the disfigurement of a soldier’s face in war, notes the following:

“Schoenmaker must have lost himself. The next he could remember he was back at an aid station, trying to convince the doctors there to take his own cartilage [to help rebuild the soldier’s face]” (1, p. 86).

That is, Schoenmaker had had a dissociative fugue, a memory gap, during which an alternate personality had temporarily taken over.

Also note the narrator’s use of the word “lost”—“Schoenmaker must have lost himself”—a word which people with multiple personality commonly use, as in Proust’s title, In Search of Lost Time, or when psychiatrists screen for multiple personality by asking if a person ever “loses time” (has a fugue or memory gap).

And finally, Esther, after her rhinoplasty, is said to have “roamed the East Side in fugue” (1, p. 96). Dissociative fugue is a common symptom of multiple personality.

Search “memory gaps” and “fugue” for past discussions of other works and writers, and how these symptoms relate to multiple personality.

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