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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Monday, February 27, 2023

“Kindred” (post 1) by Octavia E. Butler: Novel begins like trip to “The Twilight Zone”


Dana, a black woman, disappears, for what seems like hours or days to her, but more briefly to her husband, who says:


“Do you honestly believe you traveled back over a century in time and crossed three thousand miles of space to see your dead ancestors…[in] the ante bellum South?” (1, p. 46-47).


Comment: Since Octavia E. Butler was a prize-winning science fiction writer (2), she could have written for “The Twilight Zone” (3).


1. Octavia E. Butler. Kindred [1979]. Boston, Beacon Press, 2003.

2. Wikipedia. “Octavia E. Butler.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler

3. Wikipedia. “Twilight Zone (TV series). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Zone_(1959_TV_series) 

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