BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Friday, May 3, 2019


“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (post 6): Narrator reminds reader that protagonist, Jean Valjean, has dual personalities, “two knapsacks”

Earlier (see previous posts), the narrator described Jean Valjean as becoming “separated from himself” and as having internal dialogues. Now, the narrator reminds the reader that Jean Valjean has a dual personality:

“Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he might be said to carry two knapsacks; in one he had the thoughts of a saint, in the other the formidable talents of a convict. He helped himself from one or the other as occasion required” (1, p. 398).

Victor Hugo could have simply said that this saintly person still retained the skills he had learned as a convict. But, instead, after emphasizing the “peculiarity” of what he is about to say, he uses the metaphor of “two knapsacks,” by which he means that the saint and the convict are two distinct, but readily accessible, personalities.

1. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables [1862]. Trans. Charles E. Wilbour. New York, The Modern Library, 1992.
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