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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Tuesday, October 29, 2024

“The Night Guest” (1) by Icelandic novelist Hildur Knútsdóttir: Hint to nature of “night guest,” which is never explicitly stated in the novel


Hint

“Somnambulism [sleepwalking] is not uncommon in adult victims of MPD. Patients frequently have the experience of waking up in the morning and finding evidence that they were busy during the night, although they do not remember anything. They may find drawings, notes, poems, relocated furniture, discarded clothing, or other evidence that they have been up and busy. If this is a common life experience for a patient, there is an excellent chance that he or she has MPD” (2, p. 81).


Comment: Since “multiple personality” (a.k.a. dissociative identity) is never explicitly mentioned in this novel, the reader still has to understand what is going on.


1. Hildur Knútsdóttir. The Night Guest. Trans. from Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal. New York, Tor Nightfire, 2021

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. 

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