“Père Goriot” by Honoré de Balzac (post 2): Both narrator and author may have been thinking in terms of multiple personalities

In the rest of the novel, the narrator continues to distinguish between Eugène de Rastignac’s two personalities, Eugène and Rastignac. And in a couple of passages, the narrator appears to be quite conscious of what he is doing. Indeed, the narrator wonders if the young man might have a third personality, when he says that there “simultaneously coexist in any young Parisian male…two or three men at the same time” (1, p. 121).

Did Balzac think that he, himself, had multiple personalities? He may have:

“To break away from one’s habits, to become another person through the intoxication of one’s moral powers,” he wrote to his sister in November 1819, “and play that game at will, such was my pastime” (2, p. 20). And “Balzac was fond of boasting, only half in jest, that he contained within his short stature a rich array of contradictory personalities” (2, p. 142).

Perhaps two of his contradictory personalities were “Honoré” and “Balzac.”

1. Honoré de Balzac. Père Goriot [1835]. Trans. Burton Raffel. Ed. Peter Brooks. New York, W. W. Norton, 1994.

2. Diana Festa-McCormick. Honoré de Balzac. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1979.