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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Friday, May 3, 2024

“The Black Echo” (post 2) by Michael Connelly: Bosch is Described as Alternating, a Word Suggestive of Alternate Personalities


Michael Connelly describes his protagonist as alternating between the attitudes of detective and lover when he is on a stake-out with his FBI partner, Eleanor Wish, to whom Bosch is attracted:


“For the rest of the night Bosch thought alternately of Eleanor Wish” (1, p. 405) [and what they were supposed to be there to watch].


Comment: Why didn’t the author simply say that Bosch was distracted by a “mixture” of feelings, which he might have been if he had only one personality with more than one facet? It is very unusual to describe a character as alternating, per se, unless that character has multiple personality.


1. Michael Connelly. The Black Echo. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 1991. 

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