“Last Things” by Jenny Offill: In author’s first novel, the two main characters have unacknowledged multiple personality

The two main characters are Grace, an eight-year-old girl (retrospective first-person narrator) and her thirty-five-year-old mother, who is fluent in several real and invented languages.

Note: It is not crazy to invent languages. J. R. R. Tolkien said he wrote The Lord of the Rings in order to use languages he had invented; see past posts.

One review liked Offill’s novel (1), another didn’t (2), but since neither had the perspective of multiple personality, neither fully understood it.

I will apply that perspective to one passage about each character.

Mother

“My mother knew five languages by heart and could dream in three. Her father had been a linguist and once she had wanted to be one too. Sometimes she spent all night translating what one person in her dream said to another. When she woke up, she was so tired she could barely speak. That was why she slept all day and wandered around the house at night” (3, p. 6).

If she had actually been asleep all night, she wouldn’t have slept all the next day. So she had either been awake all night or in a so-called “waking sleep,” which is a trance state, not true sleep.

If a person with multiple personality speaks several languages, then it is likely that she will have alternate personalities who speak different languages and cannot understand each other. So the mother’s regular personality was acting as translator for her alternate personalities who had things to say to each other.

Girl

“Mrs. Carr [the girl’s school teacher] regretted to inform her [mother] that I was an incorrigible thief. She told how I had stolen the pennies our class had collected for the Ethiopians. Also a ruler, two finger puppets, thirty-four gold stars, and a box of paper clips. Despite repeated explanations, Grace [the girl] seems unable to grasp the concept of private property, Mrs. Carr wrote” (3, p. 76).

It is improbable that an eight-year-old girl of normal intelligence would be unable to grasp the concept of private property or that she would be motivated to steal those things. But a younger alternate personality would have been unable to grasp the concept, might have been interested in taking such things, and might have had a memory gap for what Mrs. Carr had said to Grace’s regular personality.

1. Publishers Weekly. Last Things by Jenny Offill. Starred review March 29, 1999. https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-374-18405-6

2. Bob Wake. Last Things by Jenny Offill. CultureVulture. https://culturevulture.net/books-cds/last-things/

3. Jenny Offill. Last Things. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999.