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, March 7, 2024

“A Little Life” (post 6) by Hanya Yanagihara: Not labelled as such by the author, italicized voices of alternate personalities converse


“Don’t do it, don’t fool yourself, no matter what you tell yourself, you know what you are, says one voice.

“Take a chance, says the other voice. You’re lonely. You have to try. This is the voice he always ignores.

“This may never happen again, the voice adds, and this stops him.

“It will end badly, says the first voice, and then both voices fall silent, waiting to see what he will do.

“He doesn’t know what to do; he doesn’t know what will happen. He has to find out. Everything he has learned tells him to leave; everything he has wished for tells him to stay. Be brave, he tells himself.  Brave for once" (1, pp. 357-358).


Comment: Judging by Wikipedia (2), neither the author nor reviewers of this novel recognized passages like the above as conversation among alternate personalities in multiple personality, which is probably in the novel as a reflection of the multiple personality trait in most great novelists, a theme of this blog.


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

2. Wikipedia. “A Little Life.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Life 

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