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.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

— Share site with friends.

Sunday, April 4, 2021

“Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero” by William Makepeace Thackeray (post 3): Why I’m stopping after about 200 pages of this 878-page novel


This is, indeed, a novel without a hero. It is a novel of cynicism and pessimism, which may have been a novelty and seemed insightful, once upon a time, but not now. And though it might provide more evidence for the thesis of my blog, such evidence is not rare elsewhere.


Here’s how it ends:


“Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum!  Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire?  or, having it, is satisfied? —Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out” (1, p. 878).


Do you like its attitude?


1. William Makepeace Thackeray. Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero [1848]. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Helen Small. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.

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