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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Tuesday, January 2, 2024

“Slow Horses” (post 1) by Mick Herron: Protagonist is addressed in the third person by an italicized voice in his head


“This is how River Cartwright slipped off the fast track and joined the slow horses” (1, p.1).


Italicized Voice in protagonist’s Head

“And nothing River said would get Webb to admit it was him who’d screwed up, not River. Who’d screwed up didn’t matter; who’d been visible during the screw-up did…The only reason you’re still here is your connections, River Cartwright. If not for your grandad, you’d be a distant memory” (1, p. 55).


Comment: The italicized words are spoken in the third person by an alternate personality to his regular personality, which is a textbook symptom of multiple personality. But since the protagonist has not been labeled as having multiple personality, I infer that the author thought it was ordinary psychology, because of the novelist’s own personal experience, what I call “multiple personality trait,” which, I have argued in this blog, is typical of most successful novelists.


1. Mick Herron. Slow Horses. New York, Soho Press, 2010/2020. 

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