“Crime and Punishment” (Pt 2, Chap 1) by Dostoevsky: Raskolnikov probably switches to an alternate personality and back again

In his apartment after returning from the murders, Raskolnikov is frantically trying to hide all the evidence (blood on his clothes, loot, etc.).

Surprisingly, he's called to the police station. But it’s only about an unpaid debt. The police don’t connect him to the murders.

Nevertheless, while at the police station, he experiences a sudden, radical change in attitude: “Raskolnikov…suddenly felt decidedly indifferent to anyone’s possible opinion, and this change occurred somehow in a moment, an instant…And where had these feelings come from?…A dark sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly rose to consciousness in his soul…Even if he had been sentenced to be burned at that moment, he would not have stirred, and would probably not have listened very attentively to the sentence. What was taking place in him was totally unfamiliar, new, sudden, never before experienced…Never until that minute had he experienced such a strange and terrible sensation…the most tormenting of any he had yet experienced in his life…A strange thought suddenly came to him…tell [the police] all about [the murders] yesterday, down to the last detail…” (1, pp. 103-104).

But the police say, “…we are not keeping you.”

“Raskolnikov walked out…In the street he recovered completely. ‘A search, a search, an immediate search!’ he repeated to himself, hurrying to get home. ‘The villains! They suspect me!’ His former fear again came over him entirely, from head to foot” (1, p. 106).

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment: A Novel in Six Parts with Epilogue [1866]. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Vintage Classics/Random House, 1993. 

“Crime and Punishment” (Part One) by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Raskolnikov babbles, and often returns home with amnesia for the route he has taken

Babbles

Raskolnikov says to himself “I babble too much…That’s why I don’t do anything, because I babble. However, maybe…I babble because I don’t do anything. I’ve learned to babble…thinking about…cuckooland…Am I really capable of that? Is that something serious? No, not serious at all. I’m just toying with it, for the sake of fantasy. A plaything! Yes, a plaything, if you like!” (1, p. 4).

Is that the same personality who, later in Part One, actually kills two women with an ax?

And when he says to himself, “Yes, a plaything, if you like,” who is “you”? Is it an artifact of the translation, a linguistic habit, or one of his alternate personalities? (Persons with multiple personality rarely have only two personalities.)

Fugue

“It had happened to him many times before that he would arrive at home, for example, having absolutely no recollection of which way he had come, and he had already grown used to going around that way” (1, p. 46).

Traveling some place, but having no memory for how you got there, is a dissociative fugue, a common symptom in multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity).

When traveling is not involved, but the person does not remember what happened during a period of time, it is simply a memory gap, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

The explanation is that the regular personality has no memory for what happened when one or more alternate personalities were in control. Thus, if you know the person’s alternate personalities, you can ask them, and they can tell you what happened.

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment: A Novel in Six Parts with Epilogue [1866]. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Vintage Classics/Random House, 1993. 

“Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865-1871” by Joseph Frank: Raskolnikov’s split personality was caused by radical ideology

Volume four of this five-volume biography acknowledges that the protagonist of Crime and Punishment appeared to have a split personality, “But Razumikhan’s description, it should be noted, is carefully limited only to ‘the last year and a half,’ that is, exactly the period when Raskolnikov had fallen under the influence of radical ideas” (1, p. 123).

However, this detailed biography does describe a number of Raskolnikov’s remarkable, unexplained, memory gaps, which are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, and could not have been caused by radical ideas.

I will read Crime and Punishment.

1. Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865-1871. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995. 

Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov: Is “Dual Personality” a lazy euphemism for “Multiple Personality Disorder”?

Wikipedia

“Raskolnikov is the protagonist, and the novel focuses primarily on his perspective. A 23-year-old man and former student, now destitute, Raskolnikov is described in the novel as "exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair." Perhaps the most striking feature of Raskolnikov, however, is his dual personality. On the one hand, he is cold, apathetic, and antisocial; on the other, he can be surprisingly warm and compassionate. He commits murder as well as acts of impulsive charity.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_and_Punishment

Sparknotes 101: Literature

Cites Part III, Chapter II, where Razumikhin describes Raskolnikov: “sullen, gloomy, arrogant, proud, insecure and hypochondriac. Magnanimous and kind…as if there really were two opposite characters in him, changing places with each other.” Raskolnikov may be a case study of “multiple personality disorder” (p. 160) (New York, Spark Publishing, 2005). 

Bakhtin said Dostoevsky invented “polyphonic novel,” but polyphony was already in the name “Raskolnikov,” protagonist of “Crime and Punishment”

In past posts on Dostoevsky, I discussed literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that Dostoevsky invented the “polyphonic novel,” an idea I liked, since the concept is similar to multiple personality.

However, having just checked the meaning of “Raskolnikov,” I think Dostoevsky, himself, should get credit for first associating his work with “polyphony.”

The name “Raskolnikov” means schismatic (1), which alludes to a schism in the history of the Russian Church. One difference between the old and new churches was whether to allow the singing of more than one hymn simultaneously, which was called “polyphony” (2).

Please search past posts on “Bakhtin,” “Dostoevsky,” and “Dostoevsky Duality.” The latter is a personal letter written by Dostoevsky saying that he and other people who are not commonplace have duality (the simplest form of polyphony or multiple personality).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodion_Raskolnikov

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphony_(Russian_Orthodox_liturgy) 

New York Times columnist converses with a Voice in His Head, which would be an Alternate Personality

This politically conservative columnist is a “never trumper,” who would ordinarily vote Republican, but refuses to vote for President Donald Trump. He frames today’s column as an imaginary dialogue between his Never Trump regular self and the Trump-supportive Voice-in-his-head (1).

(He also refers to the voice as his “right-wing id,” but the Freudian “id” is unconscious, primitive, and preverbal. It does not hold conscious, intellectual, dialogues.)

There are other ways that he could have labeled the other side of his dialogue. Why did he choose “a voice in my head”? A person could have a rational dialogue with a voice in his head, but only if it were an alternate personality.

I am not saying that the columnist has a mental disorder. Most people with multiple personality have multiple personality trait, not multiple personality disorder. And it is possible that the columnist has neither, but merely made a mistake in choosing his metaphor.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/opinion/sunday/pro-trump-2020-argument.html 

Visitors are Anonymous

I have no way of knowing who visits this blog. The blog software gives me statistics only: the number of visitors, the nations from which they come, and the posts visited.

Recently, the most visited post has been the one you would see by searching “Pat Barker post 6,” which I posted back in 2017. I like that post, but have no idea who is reading it.

 “No Longer Human” by Osamu Dazai (post 2): “Split inconsistent narrative” and Yozo’s secondary “sitting duck syndrome”

Do the first and second halves of this novel have different narrator personalities in charge? Search “split inconsistent narrative” to read discussions of this in other novels.

In the second half of this novel, after his wife is assaulted and he fails to protect her, Yozo says “This was truly the decisive incident of my life. I had been split through the forehead between the eyebrows” (1, p. 149).

In contrast, the narrator of the first half might have said that the decisive incident of Yozo’s life had been his nightly child abuse by servants, which he had never told anyone about (see previous post).

Indeed, repetitive trauma in childhood is the kind of trauma most commonly associated with the development of multiple personality, and it might have predisposed Yozo to experience an adult trauma as a “split” in his head.

Why couldn’t Yozo take action when his wife was raped? Some people with multiple personality who had suffered sexual abuse in childhood are more vulnerable to revictimization as adults, which has been called the “sitting duck syndrome.” And when Yozo’s wife was raped, his identification with her might have made him feel paralyzed and unable to take decisive action.

1. Osamu Dazai. No Longer Human [1948]. Translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene, 1958. New York, New Directions Paperback, 1973.

Visitors Here in Last Twenty-Four Hours Were From the Following Nations: "India, United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Argentina, Germany, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Georgia, Croatia, Japan, Pakistan, Poland, Thailand, Kosovo, and Seventy-Four Others" (quoted from list provided by blog software)

“No Longer Human” by Osamu Dazai (pseudonym of Shūji Tsushima): Renowned Japanese “I-novel” has unacknowledged multiple personality

“I-novel is a literary genre in Japanese literature used to describe a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author’s life.” Although the author typically uses first-person, “there are some instances where the author uses third-person or a named main character, such as Yozo in No Longer Human” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-novel).

Prologue

So far, I have read the Prologue, Epilogue, and first half of the novel. The prologue and epilogue are written by a man who hadn’t known Yozo, but had come into possession of three photographs taken of, and three Notebooks written by, Yozo, whom he describes as handsome, smirking, baffling, inhuman, monstrous, lacking in individuality, and inscrutable.

Epilogue

Speaking to the woman who gave him the photographs and notebooks, the man from the Prologue says, “If everything written in these notebooks is true, I probably would have wanted to put him in an insane asylum myself if I were his friend.” To which the woman replies, “The Yozo we knew…was a good boy, an angel.”

First Notebook (beginning)

First two lines: “Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being” (1, p.21).

“I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed” (1, p. 22).

When his mealtime would come, his family would “fuss over me” and say “You must be hungry”…“but what they meant by feeling hungry completely escaped me” even though “I do eat a great deal all the same” (1, p. 23).

“…I still have no understanding of what makes human beings tick”…“I wonder if I have [ever] actually been happy”…“I simply don’t understand” (1, pp. 24-25).

“I have always shook with fright before human beings…I gradually perfected myself in the role of farcical eccentric” (1, p. 28).

First Notebook (continued)

“I acquired my reputation at school less because I was the son of a rich family than because, in the vulgar parlance, I had ‘brains.’ Being a sickly child, I often missed school for a month or two or even a whole year at a stretch. Nevertheless, when I…took the examinations at the end of the year, I was always first in my class, thanks to my ‘brains.’ I never studied, even when I was well”…“My report card was all A’s except for deportment (1, pp. 33-35). (Did he really never study, or did he have memory gaps for studying?)

“My true nature, however, was one diametrically opposed to the role of mischievous imp. Already by that time I had been taught a lamentable thing by the maids and menservants; I was being corrupted” (1, p. 35). He says he experienced “torments of hell every night…I did not tell anyone about that loathsome crime perpetrated on me by the servants” (1, p. 38).

Second Notebook (beginning)

Yozo’s role as “farcical eccentric” (see above) seems designed by his ample brains (see above) to fool his fellow students and teachers. But one fellow student, Takeichi, observing Yozo’s alleged mistakes and buffoonery, catches on and says, “You did it on purpose” (1, p. 44).

However, when Takeichi is caught in the rain and gets a serious ear infection, with both ears “bursting with pus, I [Yozo] simulated an exaggerated concern…Then, in the gentle tones a woman might use, I apologized, ‘I’m so sorry I dragged you out in all this rain.’ ” Then Yozo “painstakingly swabbed his ears. Even Takeichi seemed not to be aware of the hypocrisy, the scheming, behind my actions” (1, pp. 46-47).

Comments

Was Yozo “corrupted” by maids and menservants? Did he experience “torments of hell every night”? Did he have the kind and extent of child abuse that would cause him to develop multiple personality?

In the first half of the novel, Yozo appears to have three or four personalities:

First, is the personality who feels inhuman, who can’t understand what makes people tick, and isn’t even aware of ever feeling hungry. (Does he have a hidden personality, whose job it is to deal with bodily sensations, such as those of his stomach, possibly related to his childhood illnesses?) For him, odd behavior is a genuine aspect of his inhuman feelings.

Second, is a brainy schemer whose buffoonery is calculated to fool people, or at least is recognized by Yozo as doing so.

Third, it is possible that the clownish behavior is due to a clownish personality, since Yozo sometimes makes third-person reference to “the clown” (1, p. 50).

Fourth, there was Yozo’s caring behavior for his friend's infected ears. Yozo was cynical about it, but if the behavior’s apparent sincerity was convincing to his perceptive friend, it might indicate the presence of an empathetic, caring personality, which pulled Yozo’s strings from behind-the-scenes. That might explain why, in the last words of the novel, someone who knew Yozo describes him as “a good boy, an angel” (1, p. 177).

1. Osamu Dazai. No Longer Human [1948]. Translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene, 1958. New York, New Directions Paperback, 1973. 

“Territory of Light” by Yuko Tsushima: Nameless Tokyo woman and her young daughter struggle through year of marital separation and divorce

The author “was born in Tokyo in 1947, the daughter of the novelist Osamu Dazai, who took his own life when she was one year old” (1, back flap), which is similar to the protagonist, who “had entered the world at more or less the same time as my father departed it” (1, p. 142).

The author describes herself as having a real-life/writing-life, double consciousness: “Writing is to me a way to confirm myself. If I stop writing, I will feel like a kite without string. I write fiction, but I experience the fiction I write. In that sense, they are not fiction anymore, but reality. That’s frightening. Like other novelists, I live a real life and a life as a writer. At times I get confused which is which” (2).

Double or multiple consciousness is multiple personality.

Territory of Light is the story of a modestly employed, young Tokyo woman and her two, going on three-year-old daughter, as they struggle through a year of the mother’s separation and divorce. It “sheds light on Japan’s marginalized” (3).

Namelessness

I don’t know whether Yuko Tsushima ever explained her protagonist’s namelessness.

Contrary to what most people think, namelessness of characters may not originate as a literary technique.

The only psychological situation in which namelessness is common and makes sense is multiple personality: Many alternate personalities originally lived inside, have not come out and overtly interacted with other people, or, if they have occasionally come out, have remained incognito (answering to the person’s regular name).

Thus, they haven’t needed names. Or even if they do have names, they may fear that revealing it will give people too much power over them.

And when such an alternate personality is used as a character, some authors are respectful of their character’s wish to remain nameless.

1. Yuko Tsushima. Territory of Light [1979]. Translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019.

2. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1989-01-22-8902270344-story.html3. 3. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2018/03/31/books/territory-light-timely-translation-sheds-light-japans-marginalized/ 

Added Oct. 21, 2020: Since this novel is an example of the Japanese literary genre called the "I-novel," it might be argued that the nameless narrator is simply the author. But why, then, was the author's name not used in this novel? Because the author's first name as given is a pseudonym. And as I've discussed previously, pseudonyms, per se, may raise the issue of multiple personality.

“A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman: Swedish bestseller’s protagonist is inadvertently depicted as having multiple personality

Ove, 59, has been laid off from work, and although his wife died six months ago from cancer, he speaks to her as if she were present, an example of the “ghosts” that many people normally experience when grieving.

However, as her ghostly presence fades, he decides to commit suicide, in order, as he believes, to join her in the afterlife. Seriously suicidal, he actually hangs himself. He does not die only because the rope breaks.

For most of the novel, Ove repeatedly plans to kill himself, but either tries and fails or is prevented from trying by events that engage his attention and alter his state of mind.

He has two indications of multiple personality, 1. out-of-character behavior, and 2. involuntary behavior. An example of the former is how he behaved when he first saw Sonja, the young woman who would become his wife. She was a cheerful total stranger whom he saw on a train one morning (Ove worked for the railroad at night): He took a seat next to her, and traveled hours out of his way, daily, when she was commuting to work.

Such forwardness was particularly out-of-character for a young man who was a dour loner. He’d kept to himself since becoming an orphan at age sixteen, when his father died; his mother had died when he was seven.

After they were married, Sonja said, “You don’t fool me darling, you’re dancing on the inside, Ove, when no one’s watching.” But “Ove never quite fathomed what she meant by that. He’d never been one for dancing. It seemed far too haphazard and giddy. He liked straight lines and clear decisions” (1, pp. 108-109). He concluded that they were compatible, because “She liked talking and [he] liked keeping quiet” (1, p. 129).

The above is suggestive, but not decisive for multiple personality, because it could be nothing more than a pretty girl getting a shy man out of his shell.

More convincing to me regarding multiple personalty are Ove’s episodes of behavior that are not only out-of-character, but are experienced by him as involuntary, making him wonder where that came from [from an alternate personality].

After an incident on his job at the railway, having been summoned to the office of the director, Ove said in his defense, “Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say.” “The director looked at him with surprise. It was the longest sequence of words anyone at the railway depot had heard the boy say since he started working there two years ago. In all honesty, Ove did not know where they came from” (1, p. 78). (Had the author of this novel sometimes had the experience of not knowing where his words came from?) (from an alternate personality).

In a separate incident: “Ove hauls the keys out of his pocket. As if someone else has taken control of his arm. He’s having a hard time accepting what he’s actually doing. One part of him in his head is yelling ‘NO’ while the rest of his body is busy with some sort of teenage rebellion” (1, pp. 158-159). (People with undiagnosed multiple personality often think of themselves as having “parts” with minds of their own.)

“Ove twists without meeting her eyes. Then he turns and starts to leave, while his words slip out of him involuntarily” (1, p. 221).

“Ove’s words seem to pop up out of nowhere” (1, p. 228).

“And this was the reason why Ove did not die today [by suicide]. Because he was detained by something that made him sufficiently angry to hold his attention" [prompting a switch to an angry, but nonsuicidal, alternate personality] (1, p. 270).

Comment

This novel is not intentionally about multiple personality. What, then, are these out-of-character and involuntary behaviors doing in it? They probably reflect the multiple personality trait of yet another great fiction writer.

1. Fredrik Backman. A Man Called Ove. Translation by Henning Koch. New York, Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, 2014.

“Ghost Stories: Visits from the Deceased” by Vaughan Bell

Grieving with ghosts in life and literature is a normal psychological experience:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ghost-stories-visits-from-the-deceased/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Bell

Ask each personality its age, because they often see themselves as being a specific age, different from the person's actual age, ranging from very young to senior

In the two quotes below, it would appear that two different alternate personalities are speaking:

The New York Times

Sat., Oct. 10, 2020, Print Edition

TO THE EDITOR:

    If the cabinet ever needed concrete evidence that President Trump has completely lost touch with reality and that the 25th Amendment needs to be invoked immediately, Mr. Trump provided it on Thursday when he said, “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young.”

    He later released a video in which he stated: “I’m a senior. I know you don’t know that. Nobody knows that.”

    I know that the cabinet will not exercise its clear responsibility in this matter. This man is not mentally stable, in my humble nonprofessional opinion, and these comments are far beyond amusing or mildly disturbing.

BILL GOTTDENKER
MOUNTAINSIDE, N.J.

Added 8:36 p.m.: If it were indeed true that Mr. Trump had multiple personality, then his reputation for watching a lot of television might be explained by his need to see what had been said and done, since his television-watching personality might have memory gaps to fill in. But all this is speculative. I would have to interview him about these things to know what is really going on.

“Sisters” by Daisy Johnson (post 3): Neither author nor reviewers appear to understand how the twist at the end could be psychologically possible

The twist at the end of this novel is that the narrating sister—who, throughout the novel, has been describing ongoing alleged incidents involving both herself and her sister—belatedly realizes that her sister is dead (and has been dead since before page one) (1, p. 199).

But how could she not have known that her sister was dead? Although not described, wouldn’t there have been a funeral? And if so, then for the surviving sister not to know of her sister’s death, she would have had to have had amnesia, a memory gap (cardinal symptom of multiple personality) for the funeral.

Yet neither the novel nor the reviewers (2) think this through. It appears to be one more example of their depending on the catch-all concept I call “literary madness” (i.e., no specific mental condition). They appear to explain the protagonist’s behavior as some vague combination of grief and psychosis.

But neither grief (which remembers who has died) nor psychosis—true schizophrenic psychosis does not have memory gaps; whereas, multiple personality is a dissociative disorder, not a psychosis—can explain the protagonist’s failure to recall that her sister is dead. The only psychological condition that could possibly account for what goes on in this novel is multiple personality, but neither author nor reviewers appear to have thought of it.

And if the author had no intention of writing a novel about multiple personality, how did this happen? It is probably a reflection of the author’s own psychology, which, considering the rave reviews (2), is successful.

1. Daisy Johnson. Sisters. New York, Riverhead Books, 2020.

2. Bookmarks Reviews: https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/sisters-2/ 

“Sisters” by Daisy Johnson (ending): Revealing the novel’s twist at the end is okay with the sisters

Most reviewers feel it is their duty not to reveal the twist at the end. But I feel free to do so, because the sisters themselves “liked reading the twist in books first” (1, p. 198).

My interpretation in the previous post, that this novel has a multiple personality scenario, proved correct. At the end, it is revealed that the older sister, September, has actually been dead since before the novel begins, but has seemed alive to July (the narrator), because July has a September-like alternate personality, whom July frequently sees, hears, and becomes.

However, July’s alternate personality is not labelled “alternate personality,” and July is not labelled as having “multiple personality.” Instead, July’s problem is referred to as severe “grief” (1, p. 197). So I don’t know whether the author knew she was describing multiple personality, per se.

If the author had researched multiple personality, she would have learned that it does not originate due to trauma in a person’s late teens, but rather trauma in childhood. After being symptomatically subtle and subclinical for many years (since the abuse has stopped), it may become obviously symptomatic and be first diagnosed after a death, usually the death of the parent who had abused them in childhood (2, p. 101). It is not clear how far back into childhood the abuse of July by September might have gone.

But it may be significant that the sisters, besides liking to read the twist in books first, “liked not having a dad” (1, p. 199). Their father, who had died many years ago, and whom September resembled, had probably been abusive.

At the end of the novel, although functioning well enough to be accepted to college, and having finally realized that September is dead, July, who has not been diagnosed and treated for multiple personality, still feels “There is someone else inside me, using my mouth to speak, holding me still” (1, p. 204).

1. Daisy Johnson. Sisters. New York, Riverhead Books, 2020.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis & Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.