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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Tuesday, October 11, 2022

“Plum Island” by Nelson DeMille (post 1): Why does first-person narrator, homicide detective John Corey, have an italics-rendered experience?

“Ping. Ping. There it was again. But what was it? Sometimes, if you don’t force it, it just comes back by itself” (1, p. 127).


Is he hearing a voice’s comment in his head or merely having an intuition, which tells him that something will prove to be a useful clue in his murder investigation?


But when he describes it as being able to “come back by itself,” he seems to give it a mind of its own, which is usually attributed to a person or an alternate personality.


Search “italics” for discussions of its use in other novels.


1. Nelson DeMille. Plum Island. NewYork, Grand central Publishing, 1997/2017.

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