V. S. Naipaul dies at 85: In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he acknowledged having two personalities, but was he aware of more?

Most novelists that have admitted having multiple personality do not call it “multiple personality,” and only acknowledge having two personalities, the one who does the writing and the one for regular life.

Naipaul did this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he quotes Proust, and in a 1994 interview, both of which I quoted in a past post:

December 6, 2016

V. S. Naipaul’s Nobel Prize speech says his books were written, not by “the self that frequents the world,” but by an “innermost self,” an alternate personality.

Naipaul quotes Proust, who said, “…that a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life…In fact, it is the secretions of one’s innermost self, written in solitude and for oneself alone that one gives to the public. What one bestows on private life…is the product of a quite superficial self, not the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world” (1).

Naipaul had made a similar distinction in a 1994 interview. The interviewer reports: “That is how he talks, as if he were observing from afar the creature who bears his name. He says, ‘one’ instead of ‘I’ he refers to himself as ‘the writer’ and sometimes as ‘the man.’ [Naipaul] says ‘I do it instinctively, distinguishing between them, between writer and man’ ” (2).

1. V. S. Naipaul - Nobel Lecture (2001).

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture-e.html  
http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=899

2. Feroza Jussawalla (Editor). Conversations with V. S. Naipaul. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1997, p. 139.

Are most novelists only aware of having two personalities, or are they aware of more, but two is the most that they are willing to publicly acknowledge?

In Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson famously hinted that there are more than two personalities, but that he will leave it to others, in the future, to write about them:

“I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (1, p. 48).

1. Robert Louis Stevenson. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1886]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2003.