“Random Harvest” by James Hilton (post 1): Precipitated by WWI shell shock, protagonist had had a dissociative fugue lasting years

In 1937, Charles Rainier, an Englishman in his forties, begins to tell his history of amnesia to a stranger on a train, who becomes his friend and narrator. When Rainier had been a soldier on the battlefield in WWI, “a shell screamed over and burst a few yards away, killing the others and wounding him in the head,” which precipitated a three-year-long memory gap. And now, Rainier says, “Sometimes I have a feeling of being—if it isn’t too absurd to say such a thing—of being half somebody else” (1. pp. 207-208).

“From that moment of being knocked out my memory’s a complete blank till years later when I found myself lying on a park seat in Liverpool.”

“Years later?”

“Getting on for three years…You don’t find my story very plausible?

“I might if you’d tell me the whole of it—without gaps.”

“But there are gaps—that’s just the trouble.”

“What were you doing in Liverpool?”

“…I didn’t even know it was Liverpool at first. The main thing was to know who I was…”

“Do you mean you’d been going by some other name until then?”

“Maybe. I suppose so. That’s another thing I don’t know. It's as if…there were different rooms in my mind, and as soon as the light came on in one it had to go out in the other…In fact I knew all about myself in a perfectly normal way up to the moment of that shell burst near Arras in 1917 (1, pp. 215-216).

Comment

This novel was James Hilton’s third bestseller, but I haven’t found much written about it, and what I have found, mainly Wikipedia, refers to the protagonist’s amnesia as a symptom of “shell shock.” But that seems to be only the precipitant for a dissociative fugue, usually seen in people with multiple personality. This is consistent with the character’s feeling like he’s “half somebody else.”

Another literary example of a long-lasting dissociative fugue precipitated by a frightening event is the story told by Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930): Search “Flitcraft’s Fugue.”

1. James Hilton. James Hilton’s three famous novels complete in one volume. Lost Horizon (1933), Good-Bye, Mr. Chips (1934), Random Harvest (1941) (pp. 203-438). Garden City NY, Nelson Doubleday, Book Club Edition.