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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Sunday, January 3, 2021

“Tom Jones” by Henry Fielding (post 7): Narrators listen when “something whispers [to] me” (p. 773) and “something whispers [to] us” (p. 793)


The narrators have added “something” to their singular and plural self-references (noted in the prior post). They say that something has been whispering to them about what is to happen next.


Is this whispering merely a metaphor for having a thought? Or has the author’s muse personality been telling the author’s narrator personalities what is to happen next?


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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