“The Piano Tuner” by Daniel Mason (post 3): At the end of the novel, the protagonist has a conversation with an alternate personality

Edgar, the piano tuner, is arrested by the British, because Dr. Carroll, the British hero for whom Edgar had tuned the piano, is now thought to have been a spy and a traitor. After interrogation, Edgar is locked up and left alone. Then:

“The door [of the jail] opened and a figure entered, floating, a shadow as dark as the lightless night…‘May I come in,’ the shadow asked…For a long moment there was silence, before the voice floated once again out of the darkness…‘We need you to help us find him,’ said the shadow…” (1, pp. 299-300).

As the dialogue between Edgar and the shadowy, floating, voice continues, Edgar notices that the latter knows certain specific facts that only Edgar, himself, could know. Edgar then says, “You aren’t here…You aren’t here, I hear nothing…” To which the shadow replies, “You wish to ask if I am real, or but a ghost…We have been ghosts since this all began” (1, p. 303-304).

“Shadow,” “voice,” and “ghost” are metaphors for an alternate personality. Only an alternate personality could seem like someone else, but know things that nobody else could know.

“We have been ghosts since this all began” is a metafictional comment, meaning that all the characters in a novel are ghosts or alternate personalities.

However, since no character or narrator interprets shadows, voices, and ghosts as alternate personalities, per se, it would appear that the author either did not understand or did not want to acknowledge the relation of what he wrote to multiple personality.

1. Daniel Mason. The Piano Tuner. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.