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.

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Tuesday, February 28, 2023

“Kindred” (post 3) by Octavia E. Butler: Why did Author Use Plural and Italics?


Dana, the protagonist and first-person narrator, says the following:


“I tried to get away from my thoughts, but they still came.

See how easily slaves are made? they said” (1, p. 177).


Questions 

A. Since only one thought is quoted, why isn’t it “my thought” rather than “my thoughts”? 

B. Since only one thinker, Dana, is identified, why isn’t it “I thought” rather than “they said”?

C. Why did Octavia E. Butler put the quoted thought in italics?


Answers

“They said” and the italics (search “italics”) mean that Dana experienced the thought as coming from multiple voices in her head, which, in a nonpsychotic person like Dana, I would interpret as voices of her alternate personalities (in multiple personality trait, not disorder).


Comment

I would guess that the issue of hearing voices, per se, was avoided, because the author feared that hearing voices would be misinterpreted to mean that Dana was psychotic, which was not true.


It could be argued that the author was thinking of her traumatic memories (plural), not a single thought, and that she uses "said" metaphorically, but I still think I have a point, especially since she used italics, which many authors have used for voices in the head.


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

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