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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Friday, July 21, 2023

“Life of Pi” (post 1) by Yann Martel (author of “Self”): After “part” of Pi rescues Richard Parker, a tiger, Pi’s regular personality regrets it


“The ship sank…From the lifeboat I saw something in the water.

“I cried, ‘Richard Parker, is that you?…Yes, it is you!’

“Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you, Richard Parker! Don’t give up, please. Come to the lifeboat…

“Richard Parker, can you believe what has happened to us? Tell me it’s a bad dream…Tell me I’m still in my bunk on the Tsimtsun…and soon I’ll wake up from this nightmare…(1, p. 97).


“Something in me did not want to give up on life, was not willing to let go…Where that part of me got the heart, I don’t know. “Isn’t it ironic, Richard Parker? We’re in hell yet still we’re afraid of immortality…”


“I threw the lifebuoy mightily. It fell in the water right in front of him…

With his last energies he stretched forward and took hold of it. ‘Hold on tight, I’ll pull you in.’


“Wait a second…Have I gone mad?

“I woke up to what I was doing. I yanked on the rope.

" ‘Let go of that lifebuoy, Richard Parker! I don’t want you here…Drown!’


“He was too fast. He reached up and pulled himself aboard.

“ ‘Oh my God!’

“I had a wet, trembling, half-drowned, heaving and coughing three-year-old adult Bengal tiger in my lifeboat" (1, p. 99).


Comment: In persons with undiagnosed multiple personality, the regular personality will often refer to undiagnosed alternate personalities as “parts.” Search “parts" in this blog for previous discussions. 


Multiple personality may also be suggested by Pi’s having joined multiple major religions—“Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu.”


The multiple personality is not explicit, because the author did not intend it. It is probably in this novel only as a reflection of the novelist’s multiple personality trait, which had also been suggested by his previous novel, Self (search it in this blog).


1. Yann Martel. Life of Pi (a novel). New York, Harcourt, 2001. 

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