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.

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Friday, July 1, 2022

“Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys (post 3): In Part Two, why is there another nameless narrator?


Part Two begins with Antoinette’s husband (Rochester in “Jane Eyre”) as a nameless narrator, which, a footnote indicates, the author did quite intentionally. But it would be a mistake to interpret his namelessness as a literary device or as due to the author’s antagonism toward the “Rochester” character. Recall that the Part One narrator, Antoinette, had also been nameless (initially).


As discussed in a number of past posts—search “nameless,” “namelessness,” and “nameless narrator”—it is one indication that the author’s creative process may have involved multiple personality, because namelessness is common among alternate personalities, and, even when they do have names, it may be the last thing about themselves that they want to divulge.


1. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea [1966]. Edited by Judith L. Raskin. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

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