“The Shipping News” (post 4) by E. Annie Proulx (first edition) or Annie Proulx (later editions): Multiple-personality memory gaps or merely intoxication?

“Quoyle did not remember leaving the maelstrom [a chaotic party]. One moment he was there, the next, on his hands and knees in the ditch on the far side of the bridge…He did not know where he was going, but climbed up and on. The hill over the town. The same route he took to work every day…

“He was outside her kitchen window…He looked in at Wavey [his love interest] on a kitchen chair…

“He started back toward Killick-Claw, toward the inn where he would rent a room. He had forgotten Beety and Dennis’s house, his cot in the basement” (1, pp. 257-258).

1. Annie Proulx. The Shipping News [1993]. New York, Scribner, 2003. 

Comment: The protagonist doesn’t remember leaving the party, but his mind is sufficiently clear to take the same route he took to work every day, and clear enough to stop at the window of his love interest. He has forgotten his cot in the basement of Beety and Dennis’s house, but instead heads to an inn to rent a room. 

This reminds me of Agatha Christie’s famous real-life disappearance.

Search “dissociative fugue” and “Disappearance of Agatha Christie” in this blog. 

Agatha Christie had an episode of traveling with loss of memory, which is a common symptom of multiple personality. However, since it was real life, there was no narrator to read her mind, and so there was a controversy as to whether she was faking.

But in a novel, the reader should have access to the character’s thoughts. Or why read a novel instead of seeing a movie? Proulx often fails to do this. Didn’t she know what her characters were thinking? Or did they refuse to tell her?