“The Fifth Season” by N. K. Jemisin (post 5): Childhood trauma, multiple names, bisexuality, metamorphosis as “gratuitous multiple personality”

Why does this novel have so much abuse and death of children? Essun’s son is murdered by his father. Her daughter has been kidnapped. Her other son on the island dies a violent death. Damaya’s training includes child abuse. Childhood trauma is often found in the history of people with multiple personality.

It is eventually revealed that Damaya, Syenite, and Essun are the same woman at different ages. What was the psychological reason for this scenario? Three different names for one person is a metaphor for multiple personality.

Since I had discussed, in a recent post, the coincidence of multiple personality and bisexuality, I noticed the bisexuality in this novel, regarding the captain on the island, and possibly also the protagonist’s mentor. What was the reason for including bisexuality in this novel? Because bisexuality exists in real life, and this novel is so realistic that bisexuality was included for realism? Or is the bisexuality gratuitous, another aspect of gratuitous multiple personality.

Metamorphosis or transformation of characters is a metaphor for the switching of personalities in multiple personality. The protagonist and other “orogenes” may usually look and behave like ordinary people, but then they reveal very different and destructive behavior, like they have switched from Jekyll to Hyde. And the stone-eater characters undergo even more dramatic metamorphoses, switching between their humanoid and stone personalities.

The above, together with what I discussed in the prior posts, are examples of “gratuitous multiple personality”: things in a work of fiction that are associated with, or suggestive of, multiple personality, but which were not intended by the author to suggest multiple personality, and are in the work only as a reflection of the fiction-writer’s own psychology.

Race

As I mentioned in a prior post, regarding the racial implications of the words “orogene” and “rogga,” a major theme of this novel is race. The main characters are people of color. This novel seems like a nightmare, shared with the reader by a woman of color.

In real life, one psychological effect of the persecution of people of color is “double consciousness,” a term borrowed by W. E. B. Du Bois from the study of multiple personality.

1. N. K. Jemisin. The Fifth Season. New York, Orbit Hachette, 2015.