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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Saturday, May 4, 2024

“The Black Echo” (post 3) by Michael Connelly: Unintentional Symptoms of Multiple Personality

“Rourke…moved in close and put the barrel of the gun against Bosch’s forehead” (1, p. 444). The protagonist, Detective Harry Bosch, seemingly on the verge of being shot dead, didn’t know if he could hang on much longer: “But from somewhere a voice told him to hang in” (1, p. 446).


Since the two men appeared to have been isolated in the dark tunnel, I had initially wondered if Bosch were hearing a comforting voice of an alternate personality in his head.


The true situation is eventually, but tentatively, clarified: “There was another light in the tunnel and he thought he heard a voice, a woman’s voice, telling him everything was okay. Then he thought he saw Elinor Wish’s face, floating in and out of focus. And then it sank away into inky blackness. That blackness was finally all he saw” (1, p. 448).


Comment: At first, Bosch seemed to have had two symptoms of multiple personality: 1. Hearing the voice of an alternate personality in his head, and 2. a blackout or memory gap.


But the next day he will wake up in a hospital, treated as having had physical trauma. I suspect that character development had temporarily gotten away from the no-nonsense image of the protagonist that the author had intended to project; so, then, in effect, he says, just kidding.


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

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