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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Wednesday, January 20, 2021

“Welcome to Hard Times” (post 2) by E. L. Doctorow (post 4): Multiple personality of protagonist and reflection of the author’s writing process

At the end of the novel, the evil murderer-rapist, Clay Turner, returns to the town, and is confronted by the narrator-protagonist, who screams at him with the voice of an alternate personality:


“Do you dare come out, Turner!” screaming his name again and again, the voice in my throat someone else’s, some stranger’s voice doing my work while I watched quietly…” (1, p. 205).


However, the novel’s main reflection of multiple personality is the protagonist’s practice, as the self-appointed town historian, of writing down what the other characters say and do. Doctorow’s putting characters on the stage of his mind and writing down what they say and do is a key aspect of his creative process (search “Doctorow” post 2).


1. E. L. Doctorow. Welcome to Hard Times [1960]. New York, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2007.

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