“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen (post 2): Purity Tyler is not sure of her real name, while Andreas Wolf has dissociative fugue and reads Iris Murdoch

At the beginning of this 563-page novel, the title character, Purity “Pip” Tyler, a young, in-debt and struggling college graduate in California, suspects her mother and she have falsified identities, and does not know who her father was. She is planning to join Andreas Wolf’s WikiLeaks-like group in South America in the hope that they can discover who her father was.

Years before, in East Germany, as the Berlin Wall was about to come down, Andreas Wolf has killed the abusive stepfather of a teenage girl to whom he is attracted. On the night he commits the murder, he has a brief dissociative fugue: “He found himself on the front porch again without knowing how he’d got there” (1, p. 136). Search “dissociative fugue” in this blog for past posts on this symptom of multiple personality.

“His life seemed to him a long war between two sides of him, the sick side that he had from his mother, the scrupled side that he had from a nongenetic father. But he feared that at base he was all Katya [his mother]” (1, p. 164).

On an occasion that his mother visits him, she sees a book on his shelf by the novelist Iris Murdoch, an author that she likes, too (1, p. 154). Coincidentally, that is an author whose multiple personality is discussed in this blog (search “Iris Murdoch”).

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