“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen (post 3): More clues to Andreas Wolf’s multiple personality, and his basing personhood on secrecy and memory

In my previous post, I noted early clues to the character Andreas Wolf’s multiple personality: his dissociative fugue and reading Iris Murdoch. Additional clues—change in voice, having a different part, switching to being a different person—include the following:

“ ‘Sit down,’ he said in a much different voice” (1, p. 258).

“I have to live with what I did [murder], but part of me doesn’t regret it” (1, p. 273).

“It happened again. Again, for a second, for less than a second, before he could turn his face away, she saw a wholly different person…” (1, p. 286).

Personhood

What is the difference between just having different roles and moods (as most everyone does) versus having different personalities (as in multiple personality)? Andreas Wolf explains the difference in his theory of personhood and identity:

“How do you know that you’re a person [or a personality], distinct from other people [or other personalities]? By keeping certain things to yourself…Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside” (1, p. 275).

The reason that persons with multiple personality have memory gaps is that one personality is not aware of another personality. For example, a person has a dissociative fugue when one personality has amnesia for the period of time that another personality was in control and went from one place to another. In contrast, when a person only goes from one role or mood to another, there is no memory gap, because all the roles and moods belong to the one and only personality.

So when Andreas Wolf gives his theory of identity in terms of secrecy and memory, he is explaining a key aspect of multiple personality. And when an author has a character present such a theory of identity in the context of that character’s behavioral clues to multiple personality, it strengthens the possibility that the author was writing about multiple personality intentionally (and not just inadvertently, as many authors seem to do, in what I call “gratuitous multiple personality”).

1. Jonathan Franzen. Purity. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015.