“Postmortem” by Patricia Cornwell (post 3): Multiple-personality symptoms are present in several relatively normal characters, but not in the serial killer

A man Dr. Scarpetta has been dating is shunned by her after the way he behaves, like he has a split personality: “He was so rough. He was hurting me. He thrust his tongue into my mouth. I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t he. It was as if he’d become somebody else” (1, pp. 311-312). This might have been integral to the plot if there had been speculation that the killer had a split personality, but there had not.

Another character with inconsistent behavior is the detective working on the case of the serial killer. He is initially described as inflexible, especially in his wrong-headed insistence that the serial killer must be the husband of the most recent victim. But in the second half of the novel, he becomes heroically flexible and perceptive, and is in the right place at the right time to kill the serial killer and save Dr. Scarpetta’s life. It is as if he has a different personality in the first and second halves of the novel.

Another character, a city official, had been trying to plant evidence against Dr. Scarpetta, to scapegoat her for the failure to stop the killer. But there is an unnecessary episode in which he is seen to be secretly smoking cigarettes, in contradiction of his reputation as being strongly against smoking. This gratuitously portrayed self-contradiction suggests that he might have a split personality, but why is it in this novel?

Finally, there is the protagonist herself, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, whose symptoms of multiple personality have been noted in the previous two posts. She has one more communication from her inner-voice alternate personality: “You’re making it too complicated, my inner voice was telling me. You’re getting farther and farther removed from what you actually know” (1, p. 396).

And in the two days after the detective had killed the serial rapist-murderer in Dr. Scarpetta’s house, saving her life, she has had a multiple-personality memory gap: “I could hardly remember the past two days” (1, p. 422).

Thus, in this novel, it is not the serial killer who has symptoms suggestive of multiple personality, but the relatively normal people, possibly as a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait and her view of it as ordinary psychology.

1. Patricia Cornwell. Postmortem [1990]. New York, Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2017.