BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

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Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Novelist Tana French (post 4), who says “We’re all unreliable narrators,” misunderstands the concept and what it may imply about the narrator

Definition
Unreliable narrators are unreliable in that they do not tell what most readers would consider the truth. Causes of unreliability include lying, joking, and multiple personality.

Tana French
“I love unreliable narrators, and I would absolutely love to think I have even a tiny part in there being more of them around…We’re all unreliable narrators: we all unavoidably see only a certain amount of what’s going on, and then we filter it through our own interests and desires and fears and biases. So when a really well-written narrator is showing us only the skewed version of the truth that he or she is able to see, that’s when we’re most deeply immersed in him or her, and that’s when we reach the deepest understanding of that truth that other people are real too” (1).

Multiple Personality
In multiple personality, each alternate personality (alter) has it own reality in regard to self-image, memories, interests, talents, purpose, and world view. Each alter’s memories may have gaps, and its special interests will lead it to attend to certain things only, so each alter’s overall view of reality will be distorted accordingly. And which view of reality is being presented at any given time depends on which personality is in control. Thus, if a narrator is unreliable, one possible explanation is that it is an alternate personality.

Why does Tana French think that “we’re all unreliable narrators”? Perhaps she thinks that everyone has multiple personality.

1. Interview, October 9, 2018. “Tana French: We’re All Unreliable Narrators.” https://crimereads.com/tana-french-were-all-unreliable-narrators/
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