BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

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Sunday, November 22, 2020

Alexandre Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo” (post 5): Narrator stops calling protagonist Dantès, because Dantès has switched to an alternate personality


It is understandable that the protagonist, Edmond Dantès, an escaped convict, would use pseudonyms to avoid recapture. But I am up to page 558 in this 1243-page novel, and the narrator has not referred to the protagonist as Edmond Dantès for nearly three hundred pages!


For literally hundreds of pages, the narrator has been telling the reader about the thoughts and attitudes of Monte Cristo, which means that Monte Cristo is not simply a pseudonym, but an alternate personality, especially since the thoughts and attitudes attributed to Monte Cristo are often not the kind that Edmond Dantès would have had.


1. Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo [1845]. Translated by Robin Buss. London, Penguin Books, 1996. 

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