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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Thursday, October 20, 2022

“East of Eden” (post 2) by John Steinbeck: “My god this can be a good book if I can only write it as I can hear it in my mind (1, p. 42)


Who was speaking the book in Steinbeck’s mind? His characters? But who put the book in their minds? Steinbeck? He admits he didn’t know what was in the mind of Cathy Ames, a pivotal character (2), for “You can’t go into the mind of a monster, because what happens there is completely foreign and might be gibberish” (1, p. 44).


East of Eden is a novel by American author and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck...The work was regarded by Steinbeck himself to be his magnum opus. Steinbeck stated "It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years," and "I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this" (3).


So who was speaking the book in Steinbeck’s mind? I would say a storytelling alternate personality, for who else could have been in there?


1. John Steinbeck. Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. London, Penguin Classics, 2001.

2. Wikipedia. “Cathy Ames.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_Ames

3. Wikipedia. “East of Eden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_of_Eden_(novel) 

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