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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Wednesday, February 28, 2024

“A Little Life” (post 1) by Hanya Yanagihara: Character perceives his mirror image as being its own person who also feels disgust for him


—from Novel

“ ‘You’re a coward,’ he said to his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His face looked back at him, tired with disgust” (1, p. 25).


—from Textbook

“MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror” (2, p. 62).


Comment: The novelist could have simply said that the mirror reflected the character’s own opinion. But: “His face looked back at him” suggests that the person in the mirror had his own opinion, which happened to agree with the character’s opinion. Thus, the novel has a milder form of the textbook’s multiple personality symptom. Whether or not my interpretation has gone too far may be judged by what I do or don’t find in the rest of the novel.


1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. 

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