“Cutting for Stone” (post 2) by Abraham Verghese:

Thomas Stone’s Multiple-Personality Memory Gaps

“His curse is this (and he weeps…at the recollection, he beats his head with his hand): when he wakes from his Missing Period, he senses only a perturbation in space, a gap in time, a deep embarrassment and shame, the reason for which he cannot recall, but which he can only heal by throwing himself into his work anew. He has blocked out what came before…

“But it is too late to say all this to Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Even his memory of her, beautiful and erotic, cannot arouse him or fill him with joy. Instead, when he sees her nakedness, his engorgement, the miscibility of their parts, what he feels is a violent jealousy, as if another person occupies his naked body and straddles the woman he loves…—That is me, but it is not me (1, pp. 556-557).

Comment: Thomas Stone, a central character at the beginning of the novel, is then absent for hundreds of pages, but returns toward the end, to help save the narrator’s life. Some readers may have felt that the sequence was scatterbrained, but since the novel was a bestseller, most readers must have felt it was brilliant.

Thomas Stone’s recurring memory gaps, cardinal symptoms of multiple personality, are never recognized as such, suggesting that the author did not understand their significance, and may, himself, have had multiple personality trait, a creative asset.

1. Abraham Verghese. Cutting for Stone (a novel). New York, Vintage books, 2009.