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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Saturday, February 13, 2021

“Native Speaker” by Chang-rae Lee (post 4): Protagonist is both traitor to, and lover of, immigrants, in novel’s split personality ending


The protagonist says that in his work as a spy, since he betrayed a Korean-American politician and got other immigrants deported, “My ugly immigrant’s truth…is that I have exploited my own, and those others who can be exploited. This forever is my burden to bear…Here is the sole talent I ever dared nurture” (1, pp. 319-320).


Later, in heart-warming contrast, he assists his wife, Lelia, who is a speech therapist and teacher of English-as-a-second-language to young immigrant children. He says, “I like my job. I wear a green rubber hood and act in my role as the Speech Monster. I play it well. I gobble up kids but I cower when anyone repeats the day’s secret phrase, which Lelia has them practice earlier” (1, p. 348).


And at the end of the class, in the last line of the novel, she says good-bye to each child by name, “taking care of every last pitch and accent, and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are” (1, p. 349).


Thus, the protagonist has a split, self-contradictory attitude, which may be a clue to multiple personality (search “self-contradictory”). Did the author have a profound sociological/psychological insight? Or is this how he happened to find the character and story in the dark caves of his mind? From what he once said about his writing process, it appears to be the latter: “Lee has compared his writing process to spelunking” (2, 3).


In conclusion, the features of multiple personality noted in this and prior posts appear to be another example of “gratuitous multiple personality,” which is when a novel has features of multiple personality that were probably not intended as such, but are probably in the novel only as a reflection of the psychology of the author.


1. Chang-rae Lee. Native Speaker. New York, Riverhead/Penguin, 1995/1996.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang-Rae_Lee

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caving 

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