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.

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Thursday, September 21, 2023

“Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” (post 2) by Anne Tyler: One character sleepwalks, possibly a symptom of multiple personality

Ezra is discharged from the army due to his sleepwalking, for which he had no memory (1, p. 80).


Comment: Search “Mark Twain,” “sleepwalking,” and “somnambulism” in this blog for relevant past posts.


Added same day: Ezra subsequently says, "I wasn’t really all the way asleep…I didn’t plan to sleepwalk…and could have wakened the rest of me if I’d tried” (1, pp. 120-121).


However: In multiple personality, there may be observer personalities who'd like to intervene in the behavior of action personalities, but don't actually have the power to do so.


1. Anne Tyler. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant [1982]. New York, Vintage Books, 2017.

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