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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Tuesday, February 6, 2024

“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” by Edgar Allan Poe (post 1): Protagonist is in “awe” when he looks in a mirror, a symptom of multiple personality


“As I viewed myself in a fragment of looking-glass… I was so impressed with a sense of vague awe at my appearance…” (1, p. 80).


Comment: The protagonist-narrator couches the above in a paragraph that makes it seem like a person could be in awe of his own appearance in a mirror, but the word “awe” should be used in phrases like “awe of God” (2); that is, awe of someone else. Therefore, when a character looks in a mirror and feels like he is seeing someone else, it may be a symptom of multiple personality (3, p. 62), probably a symptom of the author’s multiple personality trait.


Search “Poe” in this blog for a past post.


1. Edgar Allan Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. New York, Penguin Books, 1838/1999.

2. Wikipedia. “Awe.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awe

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

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