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 13, 2022

“Plum Island” by Nelson DeMille (post 5): John Corey, first-person narrating protagonist, suddenly refers to himself in the third person, which readers of Charles Dickens’s novel “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” were expected to recognize as multiple personality.

“I knew I was not rational anymore…John Corey had reverted to something best kept in the dark” [disembowelment of the bad guy] (1, p. 662).


Search “Charles Dickens” to see my first post, in which I discuss The Mystery of Edwin Drood.


Added Oct. 14: How was disembowelment of the villain by the hero allowed to get in, and stay in, this novel? This may be an example of a writer's losing control of a character that had a mind of its own, which is the essential feature of an alternate personality.

      And how did a hero with a history of disemboweling a villain get rave reviews and become the hero of a whole series of successful novels, if reviewers and readers had actually read the whole book?


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

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