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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Wednesday, August 21, 2019


“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini (post 2): An alternate personality cautions cowardly Amir against a fight to the death with a psychopath

Many years later, Amir—having been living in California, gotten married, and published several novels—learns that Hassan is dead, but that Hassan’s son is an orphan living in Taliban-terrorized Afghanistan.

Indeed, as Amir is shocked to learn, Hassan had been his half brother, making Hassan’s son Amir’s nephew. So now the only way that Amir can resolve his guilt for not having intervened in Hassan’s rape (see previous post) is to save the nephew.

Coincidentally, the psychopathic Taliban ringleader who has taken abusive custody of the young nephew is the very same man who had raped Hassan many years before. And so there is going to be a showdown, a physical fight, potentially to the death, between the mild-mannered novelist and the brass-knuckled sadist.

In the following passage, italics are once again used by the author to indicate when an alternate personality is talking. Also note Amir’s reference to it as “part of me” who is speaking. People with undiagnosed multiple personality often to refer to their alternate personalities as being “parts” that have their own voice and mind.

“I was thousands of miles from my wife…There was a very realistic chance that I was going to render [my wife] a widow, at the age of thirty-six. This isn’t you, Amir, part of me said. You’re gutless. It’s how you were made. And that’s not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you’ve never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is…God help him” (1, p. 275).

1. Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner [2003]. New York, Riverhead Books, 2013.

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