“The Prague Cemetery” by Umberto Eco (post 2): The protagonist’s multiple personality has become a metafictional running joke

The protagonist is Mr. Simonini. His alternate personality is Abbé Dalla Piccola. And then there is the Narrator, who intervenes periodically to interpret and summarize what otherwise would have been confusing.

“The Narrator is beginning to find this amoebean dialogue between Simonini and his intrusive abbé rather tiresome, but it would appear that on the 30th of March Simonini completed a partial reconstruction of the final events in Sicily, in which many lines [in the diary] have been blotted out and paragraphs crossed through with an X but still legible—and disturbing to read. On the 31st of March Abbé Dalla Piccola intervenes in the diary, as if to prise open tightly closed doors in Simonini’s memory, revealing to him what he is desperately refusing to remember. And on the 1st of April, after a restless night in which he recalls having attacks of nausea, Simonini makes a further entry, apparently annoyed and seeking to correct what he considers to be the abbé’s exaggerations and moralistic indignation. But the Narrator, being unsure, in short, who in the end is right, has allowed himself to describe these events as he feels they might best be reconstructed, and naturally accepts responsibility for his reconstruction” (1, p. 140).

Had the author planned to use multiple personality in this novel as a metafictional running joke? Or did his protagonist come to him already having multiple personality, which caused practical problems, and he is making the best of it?

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