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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Tuesday, June 11, 2024

“Brooklyn” by Colm Tóibín: Protagonist feels as though she were “two people,” by which the author inadvertently refers to multiple personality


“She wished now that she had not married him [her American husband], not because she did not love him and intend to return to him, but because not telling her mother or her friends [back in Ireland] made every day she had spent in America a sort of fantasy…It made her feel strangely as though she were two people” (1, p. 226).


Comment: This novel makes no explicit reference to multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity), but when the protagonist returns to Ireland for her sister’s funeral, she feels like “two people,” like two distinct personalities, the condition’s essence. And since the author is a novelist who “lives in Dublin and New York” (back cover), his protagonist’s split personality may reflect his own, creative, multiple personality trait (this blog’s thesis).


Please search “bigamy” in this blog for further discussion.


1. Colm Tóibín. Brooklyn. New York, Scribner, 2009/2015. 

2. Wikipedia. “Brooklyn (novel). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_(novel) 

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