“The Prague Cemetery” by Umberto Eco: Book reviews note protagonist’s multiple personality, but he didn’t need to have it, so why does he?

I have just started this novel, and in its opening, the protagonist, a sixty-seven-year-old professional forger, is distressed by his recent memory gaps, the mysterious entries in his diary, and his finding a room connected to his apartment that has an alternate wardrobe.

He concludes that he must have had some kind of trauma that has caused him to have a “double personality” (1, p. 26).

In order to discover what his trauma was, and thereby cure his multiple personality, he will write his life story in his diary (which will be the novel).

Thus, the protagonist’s multiple personality is explicit, and almost every review of this book mentions it, but only in passing. Reviewers don’t seem to know why it was necessary or what to make of it.

And neither the publisher nor the author appears to have considered it a selling point, since it is mentioned neither on the book flap nor in an hour-long video that I saw in which the author was interviewed about this novel.

What they think this novel is mainly about, and its chief selling point, is that the fictional protagonist is imagined to have been the one who forged The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (2).

What is of interest here is that protagonists do not need to have multiple personality to tell their story. Why, then, did this author give this protagonist multiple personality?

1. Umberto Eco. The Prague Cemetery. English Translation by Richard Dixon. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion