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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Sunday, July 23, 2023

“Life of Pi” (post 2) by Yann Martel: Author’s Mind has “Part” with Attitude 


"All I pulled in was line. I had lost the whole tackle…This loss did not strike me as a terrible blow. There were other hooks…in the kit, besides a whole other kit.


“Still, a part of my mind—the one that says what we don’t want to hear—rebuked me. ‘Stupidity has a price. You should show more care and wisdom next time.’


“…the same part of my mind that had rebuked me over my fishing fiasco scolded me again. ‘What exactly do you intend to feed that tiger of yours?…Perhaps you’re hoping that he’ll lap up the Pacific and in quenching his thirst allow you to walk to America?’ ” (1, pp. 178-179).


Comment: The above is NOT how the minds of most people work. Most people intuitively think and/or feel this or that. They are NOT addressed by the quotable voice of a "part” of their mind (an alternate personality) that has an attitude. The latter scenario is how the minds of persons with multiple personality work, which is the way the minds of most novelists work, leading them to take it for granted in portraying the minds of their characters.


Added next day: I found nothing further that is relevant here.


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

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