“The White Plague” (post 3) by Frank Herbert: Gratuitous Multiple Personality by the Author of “Dune”

“The transition had gone much more simply than he had anticipated. There remained one more essential detail to complete it. Over the next three days, he removed the hair from his head. There had been a choice—shave or do something more permanent. He chose the latter course, not an insurmountable task for a biochemist, although it proved painful and left a fine network of pink scars…The mole on his left cheek vanished under an application of liquid nitrogen…The change fascinated him…He smiled. John Roe O’Neill, rather plump and with a rich matt of brown hair, a distinctive mole on his cheek, had become this bald, slender man with eyes of burning intensity.

“Hello, John Leo Patrick McCarthy, he whispered.

“None of his old mildness had survived. This Other was driven from within" (1, pp. 38-39).

Comment: The protagonist’s old and new personalities now differ in their names, memories, attitudes, and preferred appearance, making it explicitly clear that he has a split personality (a.k.a. multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder). Of course, it’s presence in this novel is gratuitous, since revenge plots, per se, do not require it.

When recently thinking of reading Frank Herbert’s blockbuster “Dune” novels, I discovered that he’d previously written this explicitly multiple personality novel. So, I thought, for the purpose of this blog, it would waste my time to look for gratuitous symptoms of multiple personality in the “Dune” epic if the author had already shown his affinity for multiple personality in The White Plague, which I’ve now confirmed.

Meanwhile, I’ve ordered a biography of Frank Herbert to see if anything else connects him to the multiple personality trait I’ve previously detected in many other great novelists, which is the subject of this blog.

1. Frank Herbert. The White Plague. New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982.