“The Way of All Flesh” by Samuel Butler (post 3): Protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality continue, but are mentioned only in passing

“His inner self never told him that this was humbug as it did about the Latin and Greek” (1, p. 133). An inner self with opinions of its own, who may or may not choose to advise the regular personality, is an alternate personality.

“Here Ernest’s unconscious self [a conscious, alternate personality] took the matter up, and made a resistance to which his conscious self [regular personality] was unequal, by tumbling him off his chair in a fit of fainting” (1, p. 169). If it had been “unconscious,” it could not have known what was going on, and could not have tumbled him off his chair. It was unconscious only from the point of view of his regular, host personality. 

“He had been listening to the voice of the evil one on the night before, and would parley no more with such thoughts” (1, p. 232). Voices in nonpsychotic persons are probably alternate personalities.

“It puzzled him, however, that he [his regular personality] should not have known how much he [an alternate personality] had hated being a clergyman till now. He knew that he did not particularly like it, but if anyone had asked him whether he actively hated it, he would have answered no” (1, 254).

“It was not simply because he disliked his father and mother that he wanted to have no more to do with them; if it had been only this he would have put up with them; but a warning voice told him distinctly enough that if he was clean cut away from them he might still have a chance…” (1, p. 265).

“Ernest being about two and thirty years old…I knew he was writing, but…I did not know that he was actually publishing till one day he brought me a book and told me that it was his own. I opened it and found it to be a series of semi-theological, semi-social essays purporting to have been written by six or seven different people and viewing the same class of subjects from different standpoints” (1, p. 357-358). Perhaps his novel with six or seven different people—who are really alternate personalities of one person, Ernest—anticipates “The Waves” by Virginia Woolf.

Conclusion

The above symptoms of multiple personality are not acknowledged as such, because the author had not intended to write about multiple personality. Such symptoms are in novels as a reflection of the writer’s multiple personality trait.

1. Samuel Butler (1835-1902). [Ernest Pontifex or] The Way of All Flesh [A Story of English Domestic Life] [1903]. Introduction by P. N. Furbank. New York, Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.