“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen (post 5): As in “Anna Karenina,” suicide risk in multiple personality is dramatized, but the diagnosis is unacknowledged.

This 563-page novel is divided into sections (long chapters), the next to last of which is titled “The Killer” (1, pp. 447-513). It ends when The Killer, an alternate personality of Andreas Wolf, causes him to commit suicide by throwing himself over a cliff—which is comparable to when an alternate personality of Anna Karenina causes her to commit suicide by throwing herself under a train (search “Anna Karenina” in this blog).

Andreas “began to suspect there was something inside him, some other self that had always been in him, that wasn’t in other people…This thing, which he came to think of as the Killer, was…detectable [by Andreas, the host personality] only by inference" (1, p. 459). He inferred its presence, because he had thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that seemed to come from inside him, but which he did not experience as being his own. He called this other self “Killer,” because Andreas had, in fact, killed a man years ago (an event described in great detail, and in all its ramifications, earlier in the novel).

Was this “other self” an alternate personality? If it were, Andreas might have memory gaps for periods of time that Killer was fully in control. And in fact, regarding the murder, Andreas does have to wonder what it must have been like “to crush a man’s skull with a shovel [which he knows about, because, after the murder, he saw the condition of the body]…He couldn’t recall it” (1, p. 461).

Why would the alternate personality, Killer, now want to kill Andreas, the host personality? Since Killer’s motivations for killing Andreas are not discussed, I don’t know. But why would any alternate personality want to kill the host personality? Wouldn’t that be suicide for the alternate personality, too?

Violent alternate personalities often originate as protector personalities, but over the years, may get tired of protecting the host personality, whom they come to see as a weakling. In addition, since multiple personality originates in childhood, in the childlike, magical thinking of some alternate personalities, killing may be seen as a method to get another personality out of the way, not as something permanent: “In the shadowy world of the Killer, nobody was ever dead” (1, p. 460).

But even if some alternate personalities did see death as permanent, they might feel they could survive the death of the host personality, because alternate personalities often see themselves as separate people — which is why they may reject the diagnosis of multiple personality, since it implies they are just parts or “modules” (Franzen’s term, see previous post) of one person.

When a person who had previously accepted the diagnosis of multiple personality later recants, it may be an alternate personality doing the recanting, because they had never accepted the diagnosis in the first place, since it violated their subjective sense of separate, autonomous personhood.

As Purity and Anna Karenina dramatize, suicide is a risk in clinical, multiple personality disorder (as opposed to multiple personality trait, my term for the normal version).

Purity is one more example of a novel with unacknowledged multiple personality (not gratuitous multiple personality, because in Purity it is integral to plot and personality development). However, with his talk in interviews of having his own “twelve personality modules” (see prior post), Franzen appears to have given the issue considerable thought.

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