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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Friday, June 17, 2022

“The Sun Also Rises” (post 3) by Ernest Hemingway: Bizarre Opening


The most outstanding and bizarre feature of this novel is the beginning of its first page with the name and backstory of Robert Cohn, an interesting, but secondary, Jewish character.


Why doesn’t the novel begin with the first-person protagonist, Jacob Barnes, and/or his love interest, Lady Brett Ashley, the two characters at the novel’s end?


Hemingway may have thought that a Jew and antisemitism would be an attention-getting opening, which it may have been, but it appears to me that the author felt he had things to hide and was afraid to discuss himself.


1. Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises [1926]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2022.

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