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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Sunday, May 12, 2024

“Memory Man” (post 2) by David Baldacci: Amos Decker as Mr. Hyde


“I’m a high-functioning acquired savant…The injury on the field had ended forever his football career, but had given him one of the most exceptional brains in the world…the odds being somewhere around one in a billion…It was like a stranger had stepped into his body and taken over, and he could do nothing to get him out…A Jekyll and Hyde. Only Jekyll was gone and would not be coming back” (1, pp. 146-150).


Comment: How did the author create his protagonist? He starts with an extremely unlikely head injury and concludes with a metaphor for multiple personality, because multiple personality is much more common than one in a billion. And the name “Mr. Hyde” raises the question of whether the author secretly thought of him as a hero or villain.


1. David Baldacci. Memory Man. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2015 

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