“The Idiot” by Elif Batuman (post 2): Possible signs of multiple personality that most readers tend to gloss over or explain away

“He said ‘my love for you’—and then he said it was for someone else, the person writing my letters” (1, p. 133). The female protagonist, a Harvard college freshman, is commenting on email correspondence with Ivan, whom she may love. He differentiates between the woman he had met in class and her personal-letter-writing personality.

“I couldn’t work or sleep. I didn’t understand what the point of anything was, or what was supposed to happen. I was writing all the time, either in the spiral notebook or on the laptop, as close as I could to nonstop, often noting down what time it was, because I wanted to feel that I had all the time accounted for…” (1, p. 137). People with multiple personality may have memory gaps, and so may worry about “losing” periods of time.

“The phone rang. It was the editor of the literary magazine. I had won first prize in the fiction contest…I liked that I had won a contest and that they thought I was a boy…But I didn’t want my story to be published, or to read from it. (1, pp. 149-150). If she has multiple personality and her fiction-writing personality is male, he may have liked that the judges for the writing contest recognized his male gender. But since he is not a public, host personality, he wants to remain behind-the-scenes. (While her fiction-writing personality may be male, her personal email-writer personality to Ivan is probably a romance-oriented female personality.)

1. Elif Batuman. The Idiot. Penguin Books, 2017.