“Miles City, Montana” by Alice Munro (post 3): Nameless narrator has “parts” and puzzling inconsistency, all clues to multiple personality trait

When the nameless first-person narrator of this short story had been six years old, eight-year-old Steve Gauley, the son of a hired hand, had drowned, and the funeral for the child was held at the narrator’s home.

Twenty years later, the nameless narrator is the mother in a family of four: herself, her husband, Andrew, and their two children, Cynthia, six, and Meg, three and a half. The rest of the story is the family’s car trip to visit relatives, during which they pass through Miles City, Montana.

The climax of the story is when they stop at a motel that has a pool so that the two children can cool off. Meg almost drowns. But she is okay. And they continue on their trip; although, the narrator mentions in passing, referring to the distant future, “I haven’t seen Andrew in years.”

The following passage, irrelevant to the main plot (see above), seems to be about a writer’s creative process:

“I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide — sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy with my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself…I could be talking to Andrew, talking to the children and looking at whatever they wanted me to look at — a pig on a sign, a pony in a field, a Volkswagen on a revolving stand — and pouring lemonade into plastic cups, and all the time those bits and pieces would be flying together inside me. The essential composition would be achieved. This made me hopeful and lighthearted. It was being a watcher that did it. A watcher, not a keeper” (1, pp. 135-136).

Note her reference to “parts of myself.” Persons with undiagnosed multiple personality commonly think of themselves as having independent “parts.” That she has to “woo” these parts suggests they have minds of their own, the essential feature of an alternate personality.

Another clue to multiple personality is that the narrator describes herself as a person of “violent contradictions” (1, p. 138), especially in they way her attitude toward her husband changes puzzlingly back and forth between positive and negative (1, pp. 138-139).

Search “puzzling inconsistency,” “nameless,” “namelessness,” and “gratuitous multiple personality” (since it is irrelevant to the story’s main plot, and may be there only because it reflects the author’s own psychology) for previous discussions of these issues in the works of other writers.

1. Alice Munro. Carried Away: A Personal Selection of Stories. New York, Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 1977/2006.