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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Saturday, January 6, 2024

“Skippy Dies” (post 2) by Paul Murray: Literary Hoax?


At the beginning of this widely acclaimed novel, the title character, a teenager, dies, but there is no immediate medical inquiry as to his cause of death.


The bottom of each page of my paperback edition has the page numbers, from page 1 to page 661, but the tops of each page, where a novel’s title and author’s name are usually found, are blank.


Comment: Therefore, in spite of this novel’s wide acclaim and rave reviews, I think it may be a literary hoax and won’t read further.


1. Paul Murray. Skippy Dies. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010. 

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