“Hideous Kinky” by Esther Freud (post 1): Nameless narrator-protagonist hears herself  “as if it were someone else’s voice,” which is multiple consciousness

In the first third of this novel, the five-year-old narrator-protagonist has come from England with her mother and older sister to live in Morocco. Her mother and sister have not addressed her by name. And when I listened to the author interviewed (online), she was asked about her protagonist’s namelessness. She said the character was herself (Esther Freud), but not exactly; she knew it was ridiculous for the mother and sister to never address the girl by name; and she had found the naming issue confusing.

Search “namelessness” and “nameless narrator” for past posts on this recurring subject.

At one point in the story, there is a disturbance—a conflict with neighbors—and the narrator-protagonist says: “ ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ I could hear myself screaming as if it were someone else’s voice” (1, p. 62). This implies two personalities, the one hearing and the one screaming, which is dual or multiple consciousness.

Since the symptoms of multiple personality—namelessness and multiple consciousness—are not integral to the author’s intentions for plot and character development, this is another example of gratuitous multiple personality, meaning that the symptoms of multiple personality are probably in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s own psychology (multiple personality trait).

1. Esther Freud. Hideous Kinky. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.