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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

— Share site with friends.

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Nameless Narrator in “Tom Jones” by Henry Fielding (post 2) 


The editor’s Introduction of my Oxford World’s Classics edition of Tom Jones notes that the text does call the narrator “author,” but does not call the narrator “Fielding.” The editor then proceeds to discuss the narrator, calling him “Fielding,” “for convenience” (1, p. x).


And if you try to google the name of the narrator, you will find it difficult to get the correct answer: nameless.


To read about the multiple personality implications, search “namelessness,” “nameless narrators,” “nameless narrator,” and “nameless” on this site.


1. Henry Fielding. [The History of] Tom Jones [A Foundling] [1749]. Edited by John Bender and Simon Stern. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008. 

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