“Around the World in Eighty Days” by Jules Verne (post 2): The Oxford University Press introduction says a character has a “split personality”

But I just finished the novel and found no such thing, unless you consider the fact that the protagonist, Phileas Fogg, gets married at the end to be so out of character for him that it means he had a split personality.

And it is true that throughout the novel and until the very end, Fogg is described as not having an emotional bone in his body. This is how he is consistently described:

“The phlegmatic gentleman listened to her, apparently with great coldness, without a single intonation or gesture betraying the least emotion…He was unfailingly polite, but with the grace and spontaneity of an automaton…Mr Fogg replied that she had no need to worry, and that everything would sort itself out mathematically! That was the word he used” (1, pp. 81-82).

If the character had had some specific symptom of multiple personality, like memory gaps or fugues, then I could see the above as supportive of multiple personality, because his description as a phlegmatic automaton is like that of an alternate personality in that it is so far from being a well-rounded person.

Since an alternate personality is only one part of a person’s total personality, it is often relatively narrow and specialized in a particular emotion or interest. So, between the Introduction and his description, I was waiting for him to show some specific symptom of multiple personality. But it never happened.

The fact that he suddenly gets married, in and of itself, could mean nothing more than he was previously shy and inhibited, was focused on the trip around the world, and that now that the pressure was off and the pretty girl was so willing, he could relax and enjoy it. He was more well-rounded than he had appeared. But multiple personality? I don’t see it.

1. Jules Verne. Around the World in Eighty Days [1873]. Intro. and Trans. William Butcher (1995). Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.