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, March 28, 2021

“The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah (post 1): Italics indicate that thoughts or voices arguing with a character come from their alternate personality


Kristin Hannah’s best-selling novel, The Nightingale, has sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide and has been published in 45 languages (1). It is the story of Vianne and Isabelle Rossignol (surname means nightingale) during WWII in occupied France.


In this 564-page novel, it is not until page 173 that the content of a character’s mind is written in italics. Isabelle is tempted to steal a bicycle that the German soldiers had confiscated:


“Normally a bicycle would be guarded by the soldiers in the café, but on this snow-dusted morning, no one was outside at a table.

“Don’t do it.

“Her heart started beating quickly…” (2, pp. 173-174)


Why are those words in italics? As I have discussed in past posts, thoughts or voices that argue with a person are not ordinary thoughts. They come from an alternate personality.


The other sister, Vianne, has a similar experience.

“Beck [a German soldier billeting in her home] sat across from her…

“Stay away from Beck…

“Vianne heard the warning as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud beside her. She knew that in this one thing her sister was right…

“It is different now, with your sister away”…(2, p. 196).


Readers who, themselves, have such experiences may shrug it off as the “voice of reason” or the “voice of conscience.” But people who don’t have multiple personality trait, when they have mixed feelings about something and consider both sides of an issue, don’t have voices or thoughts that argue with them.


Fiction writers may not regard such thinking as involving alternate personalities, per se—and may consider it ordinary, since they themselves experience it—nevertheless, since they do realize that there is something different about it, they put it in italics.


Search “italics” to see it discussed regarding other writers.


1. Wikipedia. “Kristin Hannah.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristin_Hannah

2. Kristin Hannah. The Nightingale [2015]. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017. 

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