Multiple Personality in Modern Art and Literature

Features of multiple personality became increasingly evident in the work of three major novelists and artists: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves; Picasso’s Cubism; and Jennifer Egan, who started with The Invisible Circus, and later won a major award for A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Picasso’s Cubist figures often appeared to be a conglomeration of multiple people or personalities.

Jennifer Egan’s first novel, The Invisible Circus, had a standard novelistic format, but, as noted in a past post, its characters had unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality. Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad started with a standard format and characterization, but broke away with multiple casts of characters and jumps in time. The latter is like what a person experiences after memory gaps (a cardinal symptom of multiple personality). 

Added 01/11/2023: An example of Jennifer Egan's relating to her characters as if they were alternate personalities is her saying, in a 2011 video interview with Google about A Visit From the Goon Squad, "I flirt with ideas and then I give them to characters [to do something with]."