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.

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Thursday, January 7, 2021

“Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart (post 1): Two versions of Booker Prize-winning novel’s first paragraph, mine and the author’s


Guess which is mine and which is the author’s:


“The day was flat. He was doing his routine work, but was preoccupied with tomorrow. Tomorrow was something to look forward to.”


“The day was flat. That morning his mind had abandoned him and left his body wandering down below. The empty body went listlessly through its routine, pale and vacant-eyed under the fluorescent strip lights, as his soul floated above the aisles and thought only of tomorrow. Tomorrow was something to look forward to.”


The second version describes a dissociative experience. (Multiple personality, a.k.a. dissociative identity, is a dissociative condition.) The person’s mind is split in two, one part doing the job and the other thinking of tomorrow, but the reader is given only the latter point of view, and this mind is not aware of what the other mind might be thinking, except that, judging by the body language, it seems bored and unhappy.


The author’s version is the dissociative one. But I’m only up to page 36. So I don’t know whether the protagonist is prone to dissociation or the author just thought that his version was more literary or both.


1. Douglas Stuart. Shuggie Bain. New York, Grove Press, 2020.

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