“Enemies, A Love Story” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (post 6): Protagonist’s probable multiple personality is unacknowledged by narrator or characters

This novel, originally published in Yiddish (like all Singer’s works), was first published in English in 1972, six years before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The story, which takes place in New York City shortly after WWII, sometimes seems like a comedy, but its youthful main characters are holocaust survivors.

Herman, the protagonist, is depicted as probably having multiple personality, but Singer evidently didn’t intend to do so, since it is unacknowledged: No narrator or character recognizes the significance of his memory gaps (a cardinal symptom of multiple personality). He has a job as a ghostwriter (which is symbolic of the role that characters play in the fiction-writing process as co-writers or ghostwriters); and his trigamy—three wives at the same time, living separately, in New York City—like any multiplication of things that are usually single, is a metaphor for multiple personality, not to mention that only a person with multiple personality would get himself into such a predicament.

The following passages describe Herman’s memory gaps, his trigamy, and his sense of unidentified personalities inside him:

“These mistakes in the subway, his habit of putting things away and not remembering where, straying into wrong streets, losing manuscripts, books, and notebooks hung over Herman like a curse. He was always searching through his pockets for something he had lost. His fountain pen or his sunglasses would be missing; his wallet would vanish; his own phone number would slip from his mind. He would buy an umbrella and leave it somewhere within the day. He would put on a pair of rubbers and lose them in a matter of hours. Sometimes he imagined that imps and goblins were playing tricks on him” (1, p. 20). Search “memory gaps” and “absent-mindedness” for discussions related to diagnosis and other writers.

“He had two wives and was about to marry a third. Even though he feared the consequences of actions and the scandal that would follow, some part of him enjoyed the thrill of being faced with ever-threatening catastrophe. He both planned his actions and improvised. The ‘Unconscious,’ as von Hartmann called it, never made a mistake. Herman’s words seemed to issue from his mouth of their own accord and only later would he realize what stratagems and subterfuges he had managed to invent. Behind this mad hodgepodge of emotions, a calculating gambler throve on daily risk” (1, pp. 130-131). “The unconscious” is a misnomer. Herman evidently has alternate personalities inside him, who are fully conscious and have their own agendas.

When two of his wives had missed their menstrual periods, “Herman thought of the Yiddish saying that ten enemies can’t harm a man as much as he can harm himself. Yet he knew he wasn’t doing it all by himself; there was always his hidden opponent, his demon adversary” (1, p. 176).

Puzzling Ending

Herman simply disappears. Is he in hiding? Did he commit suicide? Nobody knows. Perhaps he is just one of the author’s alternate personalities; his services are no longer required; and he has gone back inside, where most alternate personalities live most of their lives.

1. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Enemies, A Love Story. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1972.