“Hunger” by Knut Hamsun (another Nobel Prize winner): Nameless narrator, a fiction writer, has multiple personality, but not from hunger

The translator’s Introduction mentions the protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality (without using that term):

“…Any reader of Hunger is struck by a number of truly astounding psychological facts: first…The life of the mind is depicted in Hamsun’s first novel as discontinuous. Secondly…a divided psyche: several selves may inhabit one and the same body simultaneously…While the device recalls Dostoyevsky’s treatment of the double, Hamsun uses it in a novel manner. Often, the self-division becomes the occasion for humorous playacting as the hero launches into interior dialogues between one part of his psyche and another…” (1, translator’s Introduction).

But Hunger is mostly about the effect on the mind of actual hunger and starvation. Which might raise the question in some readers’ minds at to whether multiple personality could be caused by an impaired brain.

In one episode manifesting multiple personality, the nameless narrator—search “namelessness,” “nameless narrator,” and “nameless”—says, “…my confused state was running away with me, giving me the craziest ideas, which I obeyed one after the other. No matter how much I kept telling myself that I was behaving like an idiot, it was no use; I made the stupidest faces behind the lady’s back and coughed furiously several times as I walked past her…I vaguely felt that it wasn’t I…However estranged I was from myself in that moment, so completely at the mercy of invisible influences, nothing that was taking place around me escaped my perception…” (1, pp. 12-13). The “invisible influences” were alternate personalities pulling his strings from behind the scenes.

A “confused state” in the sense of a delirium from malnutrition would have impaired his faculty of attention; whereas, at the time of the above episode, his attention was quite good (nothing around him escaped his perception) (and around that time, he was still getting inspired and writing publishable articles). Later on, when his brain was impaired from malnutrition, he had no symptoms of multiple personality.

In short, the writer in this novel shows evidence of multiple personality, but only when he is not starving and his brain is working normally, because multiple personality is an ability and mental feat that requires an intact brain with good powers of concentration and memory. It is not from hunger.

1. Knut Hamsun. Hunger [Norway, 1890]. Translated by Sverre Lyngstad. New York, Penguin Books, 1998.

“With Shuddering Fall” by Joyce Carol Oates: In author’s first novel, 17-year-old protagonist struggles with the question of whether she is crazy

“People thought she was queer in the head. True. Perhaps true…Tears streamed over her cheeks…She did not even know what she was crying about” (1, pp. 52-53). “She could not even understand her emotions, or understand if they were truly hers” (1, p. 189). In multiple personality, the personality who is “out” may experience, and be puzzled by, the emotions of another personality who is behind the scenes.

“…Karen felt that, deep inside, secretly inside her, she was able to think clearly and sanely” (1, p. 69). The personality who is “out” is aware of another personality behind the scenes who is high-functioning.

“Her mind went blank…and she lost her sense of time. She could not have said how long it was since she had left her home…Time had proceeded with gaps she did not try to understand” (1, pp. 82-83). Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, because some personalities have no memory for the period of time that another personality was “out” and in control. Search “memory gaps,” a major recurring issue.

“Your very being is a puzzle to me, a most delightful puzzle,” another character says to Karen (1, p. 124). People with multiple personality have puzzling inconsistency (due to unrecognized influences from, and switching among, alternate personalities). But, unlike people with psychosis, people with multiple personality may be quite engaging.

“Karen could not hold together the snatches of herself that were revealed to her. She was incomplete, not quite human, a mockery of a person” (1, p. 190). Yes, in multiple personality, any one personality is incomplete. It is all of the person’s personalities, taken as a whole, that compose the complete person.

Karen is psychiatrically hospitalized near the end of the novel, but the psychiatrist, about to send her home, is impressed with the basic soundness of her mind. “So very few people we send out of here—rarely anyone like you, self-cured” (1, p. 307).

At the end, back in her home town and living with her family, Karen states the main theme of Joyce Carol Oates’ first novel: “They know something is wrong with me, that my mind is wrong, put together wrong. Am I to blame for that? Can I help my mind? It is insane to look for meaning in life, and it is insane not to; what am I to do?” (1, p. 329). Keep writing.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. “With Shuddering Fall.” New York, Ecco HarperCollins, 1964, 2018.

Joyce Carol Oates (doctoral dissertation by Mary A. Brett): In seven novels “1987-1995…Oates explores the ‘Multiple personalities [that] inhabit us all.’"

https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/8557

I am not the only one to see this in her writing.

Joyce Carol Oates (brief 2013 video): Esteemed fiction writer and university professor says, “I’m not sure that I really have a personality”

Oates is referring to her regular, social personality, as seen by her husband and others. She says that what they see is just a facade, a host personality, which is gone when she is not with them.

But she either does not entirely recall, or chooses not to say, exactly what or who becomes apparent when she is alone, except that it has to do with the inner world of her creative mind, which is what she most enjoys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEnROS8bcTI

Search “Oates” to see many very interesting past posts.

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