“The Color of Light” by William Goldman: Fiction writer has ego alien experiences and memory gaps, inadvertently suggestive of multiple personality.

“William Goldman is an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He came to prominence in the 1950s as a novelist, before turning to writing for film. He has won two Academy Awards for his screenplays, first for the western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and again for All the President’s Men (1976), about journalists who broke the Watergate scandal of President Richard Nixon.” —Wikipedia.

I chose to read his novel, The Color of Light, because the protagonist, Charles Fuller (“Chub”), is a fiction writer.

If there is anything in this novel suggestive of multiple personality, it does not appear to have been the author’s intention.

Ego Alien

Chub sometimes says and does things that surprise or even astonish him, because they are ego alien, meaning they don’t feel like he, himself, has willed or originated them:

“ ‘More than anything,’ Chub heard himself reply” (1, p. 46).

“…he was stunned to see his right hand rise” (1, p. 148).

“ ‘That’s all pure plain one hundred percent unadulterated bullshit,’ Chub heard himself say” (1, p. 209).

“…Chub…fleeing across the Columbia campus, was astonished, in a passing classroom window, to see himself burst into tears” (1, p. 278).

Both Vivid Memory and Memory Gaps

Chub has both exceptionally good, and puzzlingly poor, memory. He has unusually vivid memory of some childhood experiences, like his parents’ arguing when he was six years old (1, pp. 13-14). Yet as a young adult, he sometimes has memory gaps:

“…but he had no memory later of any of what it might have been about…and later he had no memory of anything that happened there either” (1, p. 12).

“The next thing he knew it was an hour later” (1, p. 145).

“Chub held her, embarrassed almost because they had been intimate for over a year and so much of her was gone from his memory” (1, p. 157).

Comment

Since, as I have discussed previously, ego alien experiences may be due to alternate personalities, and people with multiple personality often have both exceptionally good memory and memory gaps (search “memory gaps”), you might think the author was trying to imply that his protagonist has multiple personality.

But since no narrator or character ever mentions multiple personality, the presence of its symptoms appears to be unintentional (search “gratuitous multiple personality”). Evidently, the protagonist has ego alien experiences, exceptionally good memory, and memory gaps, because the author considered them to be ordinary psychology for fiction writers. And why would the author think that unless they were aspects of his own psychology?

1. William Goldman. The Color of Light. New York, Warner Books, 1984.