“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh (post 5): An alternate personality takes over by getting the host personality to hibernate

Near the end of the novel, as the protagonist is about to start the last and strictest phase of her “hibernation,” she acknowledges that “It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous” (1, p. 260). So what is all this talk about “hibernation”? Who, if anyone, was to go into hibernation?

The fact is, she is not trying to become a different person, per se. Although she has cleaned out her apartment of almost all her personal belongings, “I needed my birth certificate and my passport and my driver’s license. At the end of my hibernation, I’d wake up—I imagined—and see my past life as an inheritance. I’d need proof of the old identity to help me access my bank accounts, to go places. It wasn’t as if I’d wake up with a different face and body and name. I’d appear to be the old me…I was born into privilege…I was not going to squander that. I’m not a moron” (1, pp. 264-265).

So if she is not after sleep, per se, and she is not expecting to become a different person, per se, what kind of transformation is she after? The key is her drug of choice.

Having tried numerous medications, she now plans to take the only one, Infermiterol, that does what she really wants, which is not to simply hibernate, but to make her want to do things that had been out of character: “Infermiterol had made me do things out of my nature for days at a time without my knowledge” (1, p. 216).

Infermiterol (a fictitious medication) was her ideal drug, because it caused her to switch to one or more alternate personalities. And by taking it for an extended period of time, she hoped to achieve a permanent switch to an alternate personality.

Actually, it was only the host personality who was to go into hibernation. “Hibernation” using Infermiterol was the plot by her alternate personality to take over.

The first-person narrator is nameless, because the one telling the story is the alternate personality. She doesn’t want to lie to the reader by claiming to be the host personality, but like most alternate personalities, she prefers to remain incognito.

1. Ottessa Moshfegh. My Year of Rest and Relaxation. New York, Penguin Press, 2018.