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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Saturday, November 12, 2022

"Small Things Like These” By Claire Keegan: Author known for care in choosing her words, repeatedly describes protagonist as having “parts”


“But some part of his mind was often tense; he could not say why” (1, p. 12).


“If a part of him wondered over what he was doing, he carried on, as was his habit…” (1, p. 63).


“…and once more the ordinary part of him simply wanted to be rid of this and get on home” (1, p. 64).


“A part of him felt disinclined to go near the house or to make any conversation but he made himself get out and cross the cobblestones, and knocked on the back door” (1, p. 89).


Comment: See today’s earlier post on “parts,” a euphemism for alternate personalities. And since this novel is not intentionally about multiple personality, I suspect it is an aspect of the author’s own mind, which makes this another example of what I have called “gratuitous multiple personality” in novels. Search it for other examples.


1. Claire Keegan. Small Things Like These. New York, Grove Press, 2021. 

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