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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Tuesday, September 10, 2019


“Ducks, Newburyport” By Lucy Ellmann: Reviews barely mention or totally ignore that first-person narrator of 1020-page Booker-nominated novel is nameless

All I’ve read are six reviews. One review mentioned in passing that the narrator was nameless. The other five ignored it.

I doubt that the protagonist’s namelessness could be accounted for merely because she is the only one talking or thinking. For a person to discuss her interests and relationships for a thousand pages, without her name ever being mentioned, I think would be implausible.

The feature most-noted by reviewers is that, although the novel is 1020 pages long, it consists almost entirely of only one sentence. Why doesn’t the narrator speak in sentences? What is the main reason that people speak in sentences? Like names, sentences facilitate communication with other people.

If the narrator were not a person, and did not normally have conversations with people, she would not need a name or sentences.

So my guess is that the narrator was an alternate personality who was very talkative (as a voice in the author’s head), but did not have conversations, per se, and did not have a name (many alternate personalities don’t).

Search “namelessness” and “nameless” for my discussion of works I’ve actually read.
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