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, February 11, 2023

“The Famished Road” by Ben Okri: Multiple Identities with Memory Gaps fulfill Diagnostic Criteria for Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)


“Sometimes I seemed to be living several lives at once…Often…voices spoke to me” (1, p. 7).


“When I awoke I felt as if my memory had been wiped clean” (1, p. 293).


Comment: The protagonist tries to understand his multiple personalities in terms of traditional African beliefs, which vary among ethnic groups. Did readers, the author, or Booker Prize judges know or care about these issues?


1. Ben Okri. The Famished Road. New York, Anchor/Doubleday, 1992.

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