“The Return of Omniscience,” a hot topic in point-of-view and narratology, mistakes an issue of writer psychology for one of experimentation and technique.

When I just googled the essay in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review (1), I found it to be a hot literary topic (2).

But they seem to discuss the issue as if writers designed their novels’ narration as a matter of experimentation or technique.

However, from what I’ve read novelists say, they choose a novel’s narrative voice according to what feels right and seems most natural to the story. So it is reflective of how the novelist’s mind worked and of the psychology of the novelist’s creative process.

The text of a novel is a projection of the writer’s mind, and if you want to understand it, you have to understand the writer’s psychology.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/books/review/the-return-of-omniscience.html

2. https://michaelzyskind363.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/The-Return1.pdf

Added September 29, 2016: Not only do many writers not choose point-of-view as a matter of technique, they may not even choose it at all, subjectively speaking. It may choose them. Many writers wait receptively for the "voice" for that novel to come to them, not from them. From where? Whose voice? From the voice of one type or another—character, narrator, or muse—alternate personality.

Mental Status Exam in “The Psychiatric Interview for Differential Diagnosis” by Jansson & Nordgaard of Denmark does not screen for dissociative identity.

The reason that most clinicians in the USA and around the world think they have never seen a case of multiple personality (dissociative identity) is that they evaluate memory like this new textbook from Denmark:

“Memory can be divided into short-term and long-term memory…Memory disturbances can be separated into those that are psychogenic (also occurring in healthy people) and those that are of organic origin. The amnestic syndrome, a disorder characterized by systematic and extensive loss of long-term memory, can be caused by head injury, alcohol, drugs, or other organic noxae…Psychogenic amnesia is a sudden amnesia occurring during periods of extreme psychotrauma…” (1, p. 85).

The above fails to ask the basic screening question for multiple personality:

Have you ever had memory gaps (not caused by head injury, alcohol, drugs, or other organic causes)? This one little question is all that most clinicians need add to their routine mental state evaluation.

If the answer to the above is positive, you might ask: Does anything ever happen that nobody else could have done, but you don’t remember doing it? Are there any significant events (weddings, sexual encounters, etc.) that you don’t remember, or have less memory of than you would expect to have? Do you ever find things in your possession (clothing, writing, etc.) that you can’t account for? Have you ever found yourself somewhere, but didn’t remember how you got there? Do people ever refer to things (conversations, etc.) that they assume you recall, but you don’t? Have you ever been accused of doing things that you didn't recall doing (and if you denied it, they thought you were a liar)?

I should mention that even if you ask all these questions, you will still miss at least a third of patients with multiple personality, because many multiples are quite bright, will guess what you are asking about, and purposely answer with a false negative. Why? Because alternate personalities think it’s none of your business, and host personalities fear it.

For further discussion, search “mental status” and “memory gaps.”

1. Lennart Jansson, Julie Nordgaard. The Psychiatric Interview for Differential Diagnosis. Switzerland, Springer, 2016.

“The Blazing World” (post 3) by Siri Hustvedt (post 6): Novel ends inconclusively, with the position of “Siri Hustvedt” on multiple personality described as “a moving target”

The novel refers to “…an obscure novelist and essayist, Siri Hustvedt, whose position Burden [the protagonist] calls ‘a moving target’ ” (1, p. 255).

The chapter that most directly addresses whether the protagonist has multiple personality, per se, is labelled as a written statement by Harriet Burden’s lifelong friend, Rachel Briefman, who just happens to be a psychiatrist. The first paragraph of the chapter contains this statement:

“…I can say firmly as a psychiatrist that Harry was not psychotic. She was not delusional…Harry was no more deluded than the average neurotic” (1, p. 234).

At the end of the chapter, Dr. Rachel Briefman says, “That’s why she was interested in multiple personalities, because she thought plurality was human…She knew perfectly well that she was Harry, but she had discovered new forms of her self…” (1, p. 243).

The psychiatrist/friend presumes, incorrectly, that multiple personality is a psychosis, in that, supposedly, the person is delusional and doesn’t know who she is. But the psychiatric diagnostic manual categorizes multiple personality as a dissociative disorder, not a psychosis. One reason is that the host personality is not delusional and always knows who she is.

I say “she,” because the character is a woman. Not because multiple personality is a feminist issue. Most of the writers discussed in this blog are men.

1. Siri Hustvedt. The Blazing World. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Most psychiatrists think they have never seen multiple personality, because personality switches usually occur in private or the alternate personality is incognito.

All persons who have multiple personality can be observed to change their demeanor and then admit that they are someone else. And when people say they have never seen a person with multiple personality, they mean they have never seen that happen with anyone.

Yes, a switch in personalities can be directly observed in all people who have multiple personality, but they usually do it in private. And when they do it in public, the alternate personality usually answers to the regular name, and remains incognito, because life is simpler that way.

Why doesn’t the regular, “host” personality tell you about the multiple personality? Because the host may not know about it due to memory gaps. So why don’t the alternate personalities tell you about it? Because they don’t think of it as multiple personality; they feel they are people in their own right, and they don’t want anyone meddling.

Although personality switches are directly observable, you are unlikely to knowingly observe them unless you know what you are doing. Most psychiatrists, including some of the best, have never received training in making this diagnosis.

For further discussion, search “mental status” in this blog.

“The Blazing World” (post 2) by Siri Hustvedt (post 5): Mostly unacknowledged, further evidence of multiple personality in first half of the novel.

The protagonist, Harriet Burden, is nearly always referred to by the male nickname, Harry. No character questions this. It is taken for granted.

The only explicit reference to multiple personality, per se, is this comment by Harry’s daughter:

“I remember when I was fifteen, our family was in Lisbon, and she went over and kissed the statue of Pessoa. My mother told me to read him, and, of course, he was famous for what he called his heteronyms [the many pseudonyms under which his fiction was published]. She was also deeply influenced by Kierkegaard [a philosopher known for the same thing]. No doubt her urge to be other people went back to childhood…I don’t mean as in multiple personalities but as in protean artist selves, selves that popped out and needed bodies. I could never have said any of this even a year ago, but slowly I’ve come to see my mother in a different light, or maybe, I should say, several different lights” (1, pp. 23-24).

An old friend says that Harry’s “drawings and later her paintings and sculptures seemed to have been made by a person I didn’t know, but whom she didn’t know either. She needed the Beast with Five Fingers, a creative imp that broke through the restraints that bound her as surely as ropes or chains” (1, p. 47)…“Harry sometimes wished she were a boy…the book Harry loved best when we were in high school: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley…The person she loved was the monster, and she used to quote long passages from his chapters by heart…” (1, p. 51).

In one of Harry’s notebooks, she addresses herself as if she were someone else, a person who is fearful and is giving Harry advice: “…there is a fear in me, a sickening reticence. For as long as I can remember it has been there, lying in wait—a fat, leaden, hideous thing. I don’t want to wake it. If I wake it, the earth will rumble and the walls will crack and fall. Put your finger to your lips, Harry, put your finger to your lips and tiptoe around the thing. Make nice and fine, Harry, as nice and fine as you know how” (1, p. 61).

“Sometime around the second glass of wine, [Harry] lowered her voice…There had been a little boy, she said, who lived under her bed in her family’s apartment…‘He breathed fire.’ Her exact words…Harry did not say ‘imaginary boy’ or ‘imaginary friend.’…‘I wanted to fly, you see, and breathe fire. Those were my dearest wishes, but it was forbidden, or I felt it was forbidden. It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breath fire” (1, p. 78).

Writing in her journal as a widow in her early sixties, she says, “Stand beside me, Bodley. Here, there is room for you, too. I love you Bodley. You are my best friend. Breathe now, Bodley, breathe fire” (1, p. 145).

In one of her other journals, she writes: “Listen to this, Harry…I am Johannes” (1, p. 201), which is a name she adopted from her reading in Kierkegaard.

1. Siri Hustvedt. The Blazing World. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Robert Frost (post 2) heard voices since childhood: “His poems came to him like voices from nowhere,” quotes biographer, in passing, implying most poets do.

“Around the time of his seventh birthday, Frost himself began to hear voices and experience a touch of clairvoyance. His mother found this unsurprising, and comforted him with stories of other gifted people who could see and hear things that ‘ordinary’ people could not. ‘To the end of his life,’ said one friend, ‘Robert believed he could hear voices, real voices. His poems came to him like voices from nowhere. He liked to be alone just to listen, to communicate with the spirit world’ ” (1, p. 15).

Rational, constructive, complex, reappearing, auditory hallucinations—especially in the context of a successful, productive life—are the voices of alternate personalities.

Frost’s history of hearing voices is consistent with the hypothesis of my previous post to explain the contradictions in his “The Road Not Taken.”

If he thought of what his voices told him as gifts from the spirit world, he would not want to revise them to suit the understanding of ordinary people.

Since the biographer, who is a poet and novelist, mentions Frost’s hearing voices in passing, without comment or surprise, he must think that hearing voices is common and normal in poets and novelists.

For related past posts, search “voice” and “voices.”

1. Jay Parini. Robert Frost: A Life. New York, Henry Holt, 1999.

Three Contradictions in “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost: He may have had two narrative voices or alternate personalities who disagreed.

Three Contradictions

First, the title of the poem emphasizes the road NOT taken, but the poem itself emphasizes the road that IS taken.

Second, contrary to what most readers assume, the poem does NOT say that the traveler came to a fork in the road. No, there were TWO ROADS. So the traveler must already have been on one of the two roads.

Third, the best-known contradiction, is that both roads are said to have been equally worn, yet one is then claimed to have been less traveled, which makes no sense.

Cynical Interpretation

It could be argued that the poet prioritized beautiful language, poetic structure, and rhyme over meaning and common sense.

Multiple Narrator Interpretation

Another possibility is that Robert Frost had two narrative voices or alternate personalities who collaborated in the writing of this poem, and that these two narrators had contradictory views, which is evident in the result.

“The Blazing World” (post 1) by Siri Hustvedt (post 4): Editor’s Introduction to Mystery of Harriet Burden, an Artist with Feminist Fury and Multiple Personality.  

This novel is the psychological postmortem of Harriet Burden, an artist who had perpetrated a hoax. She had arranged to have her art presented to the public as being the work of three male artists, to prove that a woman’s art would be praised if it were thought to be the work of men.

The “editor” explains that he or she learned of the hoax from a letter to the editor by a Richard Brickman, which had been published in a journal that the editor read. Brickman claimed that his information came from a sixty-page letter from Harriet Burden, called “Missive from the Realm of Fictional Being.” But, the editor discovered, Brickman didn’t exist, and was only a pseudonym for Burden, herself.

Harriet Burden’s daughter told the editor that her mother left twenty-four private journals, which might hold clues to “the secrets of my mother’s personality.”

Indeed, the editor found that Burden had kept multiple journals concurrently, that her handwriting varied markedly, and that “Some passages are written as arguments between two versions of herself. One voice makes a statement. Another disputes it…conflicted anger and divided intellect…do battle on the page.”

Writing in multiple journals concurrently, in different handwritings, from contradictory perspectives, all suggest that Harriet Burden had multiple personality.

The reason that Burden’s “divided intellect” intrigued the “editor,” was that the editor was working on a book, Plural Voices and Multiple Visions, which discussed real-life philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (who published under various autonomous pseudonyms) and M. M. Bakhtin (who discussed Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic,” autonomous characters).

Thus, the novel looks like it will have two themes: feminist fury and multiple personality.

[Note added 2 pm: I used the word "fury" because Hustvedt used that word in an interview to describe Burden's emotion. Hustvedt said that she enjoyed feeling that character's fury while she wrote the novel.]

1. Siri Hustvedt. The Blazing World. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2014.

In Multiple Personality, differences among personalities may include visual acuity, handedness, response to drugs, allergies, EEG, cerebral blood flow.

Recent posts mentioned headaches and pseudoseizures in some people who have multiple personality, so I might as well mention some other physical findings that have been documented in some cases.

A person with multiple personality is only one person, but alternate personalities are not pure fantasy. They may have objective, physical differences, and are not all in the mind, so to speak.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8888853

Headaches in Multiple Personality: may occur at switch from one personality to another or due to other conflicts and issues of alternate personalities.

Since the recent post on “the shaking woman” also featured the symptom of headaches, here are two references to headaches in multiple personality.

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11264694

2. https://books.google.com/books?id=AplwBTXWr44C&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=migraine+headaches+and+multiple+personalities&source=bl&ots=zJOk49Bm9V&sig=YJ430bOkBLpx4R3I0VUGTO8ZFZk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiuj7i34-_OAhWJ1CYKHf3WBlo4ChDoAQgnMAI#v=onepage&q=migraine%20headaches%20and%20multiple%20personalities&f=false

Clinician’s First Case of Multiple Personality: After 20 Hospitalizations, 12 Wrong Diagnoses, Patient Says She Is Someone Else and There Are Five Others. 

This blog is about the normal version of multiple personality, not about multiple personality disorder, but the following clinical vignette from another psychiatrist is relevant to my recent post about “the shaking woman,” since one of the patient’s symptoms is pseudoseizures.

“When this particular patient initially came to see me, she was a competent-appearing young woman who was working fairly successfully as a psychiatric nurse. The presenting personality did not reveal to me, nor did she even know, that in her off-duty hours another personality was working as a prostitute and using fair amounts of ‘speed’ and other illicit drugs. Nor did she reveal that in the 10 preceding years she had been hospitalized 20 times under 12 different psychiatric diagnoses and had been treated with eight antipsychotics, three tricyclic antidepressants, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), lithium carbonate, three antianxiety drugs, four anticonvulsant drugs, and prolonged individual and group psychotherapy with five different therapists (four psychiatrists and one nurse practitioner). Five months later she was hospitalized and had an extensive evaluation for status epilepticus with atypical grand mal seizures (discovered one year later to be a manifestation of rage by one of her…alternate personalities).

“Following neurologic, metabolic, and endocrinologic evaluations in a general hospital, she was transferred to my service in a psychiatric hospital. Her behavior had become alternately: hostile and demanding; fearful, tearful, and shaking; or depressed and suicidal. Two months later she led us to suspect her correct diagnosis when she told a nurse she was really someone with a name different from the one we knew her by, and that there were five others as well. There is no telling how much longer she would have remained misdiagnosed if she had not revealed herself” (1, p. 243).

I don’t know anything about this woman except what is quoted above. But I would guess that subsequent treatment was difficult. For one thing, the patient is not described as claiming or acknowledging that she has multiple personality. Although she makes a candid statement which reveals that she has multiple personality—that she is not the person the doctors think she is, that she is another person with a different name, and that there are five others—this does not mean that she thinks she has, or would accept the diagnosis of, multiple personality.

The alternate personality who spoke up no doubt thinks of herself as a person in her own right. And when the woman later switched back to her regular, host personality (the personality who has the regular name that the doctors know her by), the host personality would have a memory gap for the time that the alternate personality was in control. And so the host personality would likely say that a diagnosis of multiple personality is far-fetched and preposterous.

Otherwise, the multiple personality would have been diagnosed by one of her many other doctors, and there would not have been 20 previous hospitalizations and 12 wrong diagnoses. Indeed, if someone were to confront the host personality—“You told the other doctor that you were a different person with a different name. It’s in the record”—the host personality might reply, “Well, if I did say that, I was lying!”

However, the vignette does say that, a year later, the woman’s pseudoseizures were discovered to be a manifestation of the rage of one of her alternate personalities, so I guess she didn’t flee treatment, and that she and her psychiatrist were able to work together.

1. Richard E. Hicks, MD. “Discussion: A Clinician’s Perspective,” Chapter 10, in Richard P. Kluft, MD, PhD, Editor, Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality. Washington DC, American Psychiatric Press, 1985.

Siri Hustvedt (post 3) on how she became her father, like writers become their characters, and people with multiple personality become alternate personalities.

“During the last week I spent with my father before he died…On one of those last nights, I crawled into the narrow, too short bed I had slept in as a child and pulled the covers over me. As I lay there, thinking of my father, I felt the oxygen line in my nostrils and its discomfort, the heaviness of my lame leg, from which a tumor had been removed years before, the pressure in my tightened lungs, and a sudden panicked helplessness that I could not move from the bed on my own but would have to call for help. For however long it lasted, only minutes, I was my father. The sensation was both overwhelming and awful. I felt the proximity of death, its inexorable pull, and I had to struggle to leap back into my own body, to find myself again” (1, pp. 124-125).

Was that a one-time identification with her father, or did she have an on-going identification, an alternate personality, who was patterned after her father? And had she switched to that alternate personality for a few minutes? She notes that her father had once told her of his having had “a trembling fit” (1, p. 126). Was the shaking woman really a shaking man, an alternate personality patterned after her father, inside her? Or was it the shaking of an alternate personality derived from the febrile convulsions she had had as a child? (1, p. 153).

The point here is that Hustvedt becomes other people, psychologically speaking. She becomes her characters when she writes a novel. She became her father as described above.

And who have subjectively realistic experiences of becoming other people? People with multiple personality do, when they switch to their alternate personalities.

1. Siri Hustvedt. The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. New York, Frances Coady/Henry Holt, 2009.

“The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves” by Siri Hustvedt (post 2): She has “sense that two Siris were present,” but no evaluation for multiple personality.

Two and half years after her father’s death, speaking at a memorial for him, she “launched into my first sentence, and began to shudder violently from the neck down. My arms flapped. My knees knocked. I shook as if I were having a seizure. Weirdly, my voice wasn’t affected. It didn’t change at all…When the speech ended, the shaking stopped” (1, p. 3).

“Once before, during the summer of 1982…In an art gallery in Paris, I suddenly felt my left arm jerk upward and slam me backward into the wall. The whole event lasted no more than a few seconds. Not long after that…came the violent migraine that lasted for almost a year…I have suffered from migraines since childhood” (1, pp. 4-5).

“The shaking woman felt like me and not like me at the same time. From the chin up, I was my familiar self. From the neck down, I was a shuddering stranger…I decided to go in search of the shaking woman” (1, p. 7).

“I have a vague sense that there are hidden recesses of my personality that I am reluctant to penetrate. Maybe that’s the part of me that shook” (1, p. 19).

“Did I…have a kind of double consciousness—a shuddering person and a cool one?” (1, p. 27).

Recurrent attacks of shaking when giving talks were minimized by taking propranolol (Inderal), “but I felt the quiver internally…It was like shaking without shaking” and she had “a grim sense that two Siris were present, not one” (1, p. 40).

“The strangeness of a duality in myself remains, a powerful sense of an ‘I’ and an uncontrollable other. The shaking woman is certainly not anyone with a name. She is a speechless alien who appears only during my speeches…I have come to think of the shaking woman as an untamed other self, a Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll, a kind of double” (1, p. 47).

“Is each of us a singular being or a plural one?” (1, p. 69).

“When I am writing well…the sentences come as if I hadn’t willed them, as if they were manufactured by another being…the sense that I have been taken over happens several times during the course of a book…I don’t write; I am written…What is at work in automatic writing?” (1, p. 72).

“When I write fiction, I see my characters moving around, speaking, and acting…I am usually one of those characters, not I as I but I as someone else, an other self, male or female, projected into the mental world I inhabit as I write” (1, p. 112).

“When I shook, it didn’t feel like me. That was the problem” (1, p. 193). The problem has never been explained or solved, but is under control, and she is at peace with it.

Hustvedt has studied this problem for years. She has been evaluated by various medical, neurological, and psychiatric specialists. And her book has about as many notes and scholarly references as pages.

But only two of her many references are books about multiple personality, and neither of these books has “diagnosis” in its title. Indeed, they are not the kind of books someone would read to find out if she had multiple personality, a condition whose physical symptoms may include pseudoseizures and severe headaches (2). 

1. Siri Hustvedt. The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. New York, Frances Coady/Henry Holt, 2009.

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

Siri Hustvedt, an eminent writer (1), says her name is Legion, hears voices, feels plural, can inhabit both men and women, sees a stranger in the mirror.

“…all those jabbering voices every fiction writer hears in his or her head. Writing novels is a solitary act that is also plural…” (2, p. 42).

“When I write fiction, I also leave my real body behind and become someone else, another woman or a man if I wish. For me, making art has always been a kind of conscious dreaming. The material for a story comes not from what I know but from what I don’t know, from impulses and images that often seem to happen without my directives…” (2, p. 96).

“When I write a book, I am also listening. I hear characters talk as if they were outside me rather than inside me…and I am free to inhabit both men and women and to tell their stories” (2, p. 103).

“Around the age of eleven, I suffered commanding inner voices and rhythms that terrified me with their insistence. They always came when I was alone, and they seemed to want to impose their will on me, to press my body into their marching orders. The danger of madness seemed very real to me then, and I’m lucky they vanished” (2, p. 199-200).

“…I was standing in the tiny student room I had rented, and I turned to look at myself in the small mirror over the sink. I knew the person I was looking at was myself, and yet there was an alien quality to my reflection, an otherness that brought with it feelings of exuberance and celebration. All at once, I was looking at a stranger” (2, p. 221-222).

“Is the wounded self the writing self? Is the writing self an answer to the wounded self?…The writing self is multiple and elastic…is restless and searching, and it listens for voices. Where do they come from, these chatterers who talk to me before I fall asleep? My characters. I am making them and not making them…They discuss, fight, laugh, yell, and weep. I was very young when I first heard the story of the exorcism Jesus performs on a possessed man…‘My name is Legion.’ That is my name, too” (2, p. 228).

Search (in this blog) “name is Legion,” “voices,” and “mirror” to see some related past posts.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_Hustvedt

2. Siri Hustvedt. A Plea for Eros: Essays. New York, Picador, 2006.

“Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” by Haruki Murakami (post 2): Science-fiction fantasy about protagonist with preexisting multiple personality.

In both the author’s Paris Review interview (see previous post) and the back cover of the novel, the nameless protagonist (search nameless and namelessness in this blog) of this novel is said to have a split mind due to brain surgery. And the character does, indeed, have such surgery.

But the novel also says that the protagonist, prior to surgery, already had multiple personality, possibly due to childhood trauma.

The Professor, who had done brain surgery on the protagonist and twenty-five other people, to make them into split-brained data processors, says to the protagonist (first-person narrator):

“All twenty-five of them died within a half-year of each other…And here you are, three years and three months later, still shuffling with no problems. This leads us t’believe that you possess some special oomph that the others didn’t”…

“So why didn’t I die?”

“…It seems you were operatin’ under multiple cognitive systems t’begin with. Not even you knew you were dividin’ your time between two identities…

“I find that very hard to believe,” I said.

“I can think of many possible causes,” the Professor assured me. “Childhood trauma…”

The protagonist acknowledges “this split personality of mine” (1, pp. 265-273).

In the Paris Review interview (see previous post), Murakami says that he feels “split” when he writes.

And as the Professor says, “Mental phenomena are the stuff writers make into novels” (1, p. 262).

1. Haruki Murakami. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World [1985]. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum. New York, Vintage International, 1991/1993.

Writing the way they think: Don’t ask novelists, “Is this autobiographical?” Ask “Is this a literary technique, or does it reflect the way your mind works?”

It is usually unproductive to ask novelists if things in their books are autobiographical, because the answer will depend on whether they take your question to address only their host personality or to include their alternate personalities, too.

For example, a fat character in a novel may not indicate that the author’s host personality ever had a weight problem, but that one of the author’s alternate personalities may have. So you might ask authors if something in their books is autobiographical for any of their personalities. However, I don’t know if novelists would treat the question as a joke or give an honest answer.

It might be better to ask if unusual features of their characters or stories—for example, “magical” aspects—are intentional literary techniques, or are, to some extent, the way the author thinks.

I have previously mentioned this issue. Search “experimental” to see prior posts. But it is worth repeating that most novelists write the way they do, not to make technical innovations, but because that is how they think.

“City of Glass” by Paul Auster (post 4): The theme—that not only writers, but possibly everyone, has multiple personality—is an exaggeration.

There are no real people in this novel, only alternate personalities, who don’t live and die, but instead, come and go: come out where they can be seen and go back inside where they can’t be seen, as alternate personalities do.

The prime example, the protagonist, Daniel Quinn, is described (see previous post) as the least real (in the sense of being out and active in the world) of a triad of personalities, which consists of Quinn, a writer, his pseudonym (William Wilson), and Wilson’s fictional detective. At the end of the novel, since Quinn is not a real person, his disappearance does not need to be accounted for—he is not hospitalized; there is no dead body; he just ceases to be out in the world where he can be seen.

Paul Auster, himself, is depicted, by name, as just another character in this novel. And if the protagonist, the most important character, is more like an alternate personality than like a real person, then certainly a less important character like Paul Auster must be an alternate personality, too.

And since both of its writer characters, Daniel Quinn and Paul Auster, are alternate personalities, one theme of this novel is that writers have multiple personality.

Indeed, since all the characters in this novel may be alternate personalities, the theme may be that all people have multiple personality. As one character says:

“…people change, don’t they? One minute we’re one thing, and then another another” (1, p. 83).

However, I think it is an exaggeration to say that everyone has multiple personality. When writers imply that that is the case, they are overgeneralizing from their own personal experience.

Also, I am not saying that Paul Auster intended the precise theme about multiple personality that I have ascribed to his novel. He probably intended to tell an intriguing story about reality and identity, which he succeeded in doing. As the novel says in its opening paragraph:

“Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance…The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell” (1, p. 3).

1. Paul Auster. The New York Trilogy: City of Glass [1985], Ghosts, The Locked Room. New York, Penguin Books, 2006.

“City of Glass” by Paul Auster (post 3): Is the beginning metafiction, postmodernism, or the magical inner world of a writer with multiple personality?

The first novel of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy begins as the story of a man with multiple personality, which is explicitly described, but unlabeled and unacknowledged as such.

The protagonist, a Mr. Quinn, is described as a “triad of selves” (1, p. 6): 1. Quinn, a writer; 2. William Wilson, the pseudonymous author of Quinn’s detective novels; and 3. Max Work, Wilson’s private-eye narrator. (“William Wilson” was the title character of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous multiple personality story.)

“In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise…[Quinn] had, of course, long ago stopped thinking of himself as real. If he lived now in the world at all, it was only at one remove, through the imaginary person of Max Work. His detective necessarily had to be real” (1, pp. 6-9).

At this point, Quinn gets a telephone call from someone asking to speak to “Paul Auster. Of the Auster Detective Agency” (1, p. 7). Quinn decides to pretend that he is Paul Auster and meet with the caller, who hires Quinn to protect a young adult, Peter Stillman, from his father, who had kept Peter in a dark room for most of his early childhood. The father, after thirteen years hospitalization or imprisonment, is about to be set free and return to New York.

So far, the only way I can make sense of this story is to think of all the characters as the alternate personalities of one person. What critics refer to as metafiction or postmodernism seems to me like the creative, magical, inner world of a writer with multiple personality.

1. Paul Auster. The New York Trilogy: City of Glass [1985], Ghosts, The Locked Room. New York, Penguin Books, 2006.

“Portrait of an Invisible Man” by Paul Auster (post 2): Why Was His Late Father Invisible? Auster’s Sixty-Nine Page Meditation on His Father’s Contradictions.

In recent posts on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, I pointed out that one reason for the Invisible Man’s invisibility was his multiple personality, since his alternate personalities were usually hidden.

In undiagnosed multiple personality, not only are the alternate personalities usually hidden, but when they do come out, they usually do so incognito.

And since the alternate personalities are different from each other, but incognito, you don’t realize that you are seeing them, but you do have a vague sense that the person has puzzling contradictions.

Paul Auster sums up his impressions of his invisible man, his father, as follows:

“The rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction. I understand now that each fact is nullified by the next fact, that each thought engenders an equal and opposite thought. Impossible to say anything without reservation: he was good, or he was bad; he was this, or he was that. All of them are true. At times I have the feeling that I am writing about three or four different men, each one distinct, each one a contradiction of all the others.” (1, p. 62).

1. Paul Auster. The Invention of Solitude [1982]. New York, Penguin Books, 2007.

Kurt Vonnegut: His memory gap for the bombing of Dresden and the dissociative features (suggestive of multiple personality) in his writing process.

Memory Gap

Vonnegut: “…the book [Slaughterhouse-Five] was largely a found object. It was what was in my head, and I was able to get it out, but one of the characteristics about this object was that there was a complete blank where the bombing of Dresden took place, because I don’t remember…There were all kinds of information surrounding the event, but as far as my memory bank was concerned, the center had been pulled right out of the story…”

Q: “Even if you don’t remember it, did the experience of being interned—and bombed—in Dresden change you in any way?”

Vonnegut: No. I suppose you’d think so, because that’s the cliché. The importance of Dresden in my life has been considerably exaggerated because my book about it became a best seller. If the book hadn’t been a best seller, it would seem like a very minor experience in my life. And I don’t think people’s lives are changed by short-term events like that. Dresden was astonishing, but experiences can be astonishing without changing you” (1, p. 94).

People with multiple personality have memory gaps that go beyond ordinary forgetting. His memory gap for the bombing of Dresden may be significant in that regard. Search “memory gaps” in this blog for previous posts.

Writing Process

Vonnegut describes automatic writing, becoming his characters, and getting messages from his “intelligence,” all of which suggests that his writing process involved alternate personalities.

“All this falls into the area of automatic writing, really. There isn’t time to be rational about it and plan what you’re going to do” (1, p. 50).

“When I write I also act, and I think this is true of most novelists. I will walk around talking to myself, saying out loud what a character is going to say, so that I will become one character and then another one, trying each on for size. So in the process of writing I have identified with every reasonably complex character in any of my books” (1, p. 68).

“…I know that if I spend enough time at the typewriter the most intelligent part of me will finally make itself known and I will be able to decode what it is trying to talk about. It’s a little like a ouija board. I will get a clue to what my intelligence wants to talk about, and then I will try to talk about it more and more” (1, p. 73).

Q.: What sort of things do you plan to write from now on?

Vonnegut: I can guess. It isn’t really up to me. I come to work every morning and I see what words come out of the typewriter. I feel like a copyboy whose job is to tear off stories from the teletype machine and deliver them to the editor” (1, pp. 109-110).

“…after a day when I’ve been at it for hours and am dissatisfied with what I’ve produced…if I’m patient, a nice egg-shaped idea emerges and I can tell my intelligence has gotten through. It’s a slow process, though, and an annoying one, because you have to sit so long” (1, p. 199).

1. Willian Rodney Allen (Editor). Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.