BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

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Friday, March 16, 2018


Gratuitous Reference to Multiple Personality in “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid (post 2): It is unwarranted by character development or plot.

“Nadia sat on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone…and…she thought she saw online a photograph of herself sitting on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone…and she was startled, and wondered how this could be…and she almost felt that if she got up and walked home at this moment there would be two Nadias, that she would split into two Nadias…and two different lives would unfold for these two different selves…” (p. 157).

“Reading the news at that time one was tempted to conclude that the nation was like a person with multiple personalities, some insisting on union and some insisting on disintegration…” (p. 158).

This novel is not in the habit of invoking psychiatric conditions to describe experiences of its major characters or the collective psychology of the general public. So it is surprising that the novel does so in these two instances, and that, of all psychiatric conditions, it chooses multiple personality.

When a novel has descriptions of, or references to, multiple personality that are not warranted by character development or plot, I call it “gratuitous multiple personality” (search), which I interpret as a reflection of the author’s psychology.

Mohsin Hamid. Exit West. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017.
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