“The Kite Runner” a novel by Khaled Hosseini is scheduled for Broadway:  "Chameleon Flies From ‘Blacklist’ to ‘Kite Runner’" https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/theater/the-kite-runner-amir-arison.html

"Chameleon" may suggest actor has multiple personality trait.

Note: Search "chameleon" for related posts.

Three Past Posts on the novel from 2019

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini: Amir hears the cold, dark voice of his alternate personality, who criticizes Amir’s childhood playmate, Hassan

In the first hundred pages of this novel, the first-person protagonist, Amir, looking back from 2001, recalls his life as a twelve-year-old boy in 1970s Afghanistan. His mother had died when he was born. His father, rich and manly, has always treated Amir, a budding writer, as a big disappointment.

After winning the Kite-flying competition, Amir witnesses his Kite-flying partner and lifelong playmate, Hassan, being raped by a Hitler-admiring bully and two accomplices. Amir fails to intervene, because he fears that he, himself, would be severely beaten. Moreover, he does not tell his father about the rape, because his failure to defend Hassan would reinforce his father’s disappointment in him. Then he compounds his moral guilt by plotting to have Hassan move far away, so that Amir would not be continually reminded of his own cowardice.

Earlier in the novel, there had been an incident that helps explain why Amir later fails to defend Hassan: Amir reads one of his short stories to Hassan, a story in which a character commits murder to make himself cry, because his tears are magically turned into pearls. Hassan asks why the character could not have made himself cry with an onion.

“I was stunned. That particular point, so obvious it was utterly stupid, hadn’t even occurred to me…Taught by Hassan, of all people. Hassan who couldn’t read and had never written a single word in his entire life. A voice, cold and dark, suddenly whispered in my ear, What does he know, that illiterate Hazara? He’ll never be anything but a cook. How dare he criticize you?” (1, p. 34).

Comment

Most nonpsychotic, normal people do not hear rational voices who seem to have opinions, and who address the regular self as “you.” Only people with multiple personality hear such voices. Thus, Amir, who is a nonpsychotic, normal, budding fiction writer, was hearing the voice of an alternate personality.

Assuming that the author was not knowingly and intentionally building a case that Amir had multiple personality, then the author may have mistakenly thought that most people hear such voices, because the author occasionally did.

1. Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner [2003]. New York, Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House, 2013.

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini (post 2): An alternate personality cautions cowardly Amir against a fight to the death with a psychopath

Many years later, Amir—having been living in California, gotten married, and published several novels—learns that Hassan is dead, but that Hassan’s son is an orphan living in Taliban-terrorized Afghanistan.

Indeed, as Amir is shocked to learn, Hassan had been his half brother, making Hassan’s son Amir’s nephew. So now the only way that Amir can resolve his guilt for not having intervened in Hassan’s rape (see previous post) is to save the nephew.

Coincidentally, the psychopathic Taliban ringleader who has taken abusive custody of the young nephew is the very same man who had raped Hassan many years before. And so there is going to be a showdown, a physical fight, potentially to the death, between the mild-mannered novelist and the brass-knuckled sadist.

In the following passage, italics are once again used by the author to indicate when an alternate personality is talking. Also note Amir’s reference to it as “part of me” who is speaking. People with undiagnosed multiple personality often to refer to their alternate personalities as being “parts” that have their own voice and mind.

“I was thousands of miles from my wife…There was a very realistic chance that I was going to render [my wife] a widow, at the age of thirty-six. This isn’t you, Amir, part of me said. You’re gutless. It’s how you were made. And that’s not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you’ve never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is…God help him” (1, p. 275).

1. Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner [2003]. New York, Riverhead Books, 2013.

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini (post 3): Importance of protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality (his voices) is their irrelevance

Why, on two occasions, is the protagonist portrayed as hearing the kind of voices that are typical of multiple personality (see previous posts)? I have finished this novel, and there turns out to be no good reason for his hearing such voices in either plot or character development.

This is what I call “gratuitous multiple personality.” And the reason for it is that it reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology—or, at least, in this case, his view of the psychology of fiction writers, since the protagonist of this novel is a novelist—based on the author’s own psychology.

My finding gratuitous multiple personality in many novels is part of my evidence that many fiction writers have multiple personality trait.

Another thing I have found in many novels is “unacknowledged multiple personality,” which means that a work of fiction has unlabeled symptoms of multiple personality that are integral to plot or character development and are relevant to understanding what you are reading.

Search “gratuitous multiple personality” and “unacknowledged multiple personality” on this site for previous discussions in regard to many other writers.

Choose the better question for Great Writers: “What is the Art of Fiction?” or “Who is really controlling the pen?”

“Editor Daniel Halpern was profoundly curious about the creative process–so he asked fifty-five world-renowned writers to briefly muse on the fictional persona behind the scenes, the alter(ed) ego who takes over when there is true literary work to be done” (1, back cover).

1. Daniel Halpern (Editor). Who’s Writing This?: Fifty-Five Writers on Humor, Courage, Self-Loathing, and the Creative Process. New York, ecco/Harper Perennial, 1995/2009. 

“Most people hear an inner voice, recognized as their own, on a daily basis”

I opened this book (1), because of its subtitle, but was stopped by its first sentence, quoted above, since I don’t hear an inner voice, and the book's title refers to psychologist Julian Jaynes’ theory about the cerebral hemispheres, which I have not adopted. 

But Platt’s book reinforces the idea that many normal people do hear voices, for some reason (which I argue is multiple personality trait).

1. Carole Brooks Platt, PhD. In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses. Exeter UK, Imprint Academic, 2015. 

“Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys (post 4): Belated, bizarre renaming of Antoinette, the protagonist

‘Don’t laugh like that, Bertha.’

‘My name is not Bertha; why do you call me Bertha?’

‘Because it is a name I’m particularly fond of. I think of you as Bertha.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said  (1, p. 81).

Comment: The author has Antoinette say “It doesn’t matter.” And many readers of fiction, having suspended disbelief, may gloss over how bizarre it is for a husband to suddenly address his wife by a different name than she has always had, and by which he married her.

Since Rhys intended this novel to be a prequel to Jane Eyre, and would want her protagonist to eventually be named “Bertha Rochester,” wouldn’t there have been a more credible way for her protagonist to be called “Bertha?” For a husband to suddenly address his wife by a different name makes him look like the crazy one. Is that what Rhys intended? Or is the reader supposed to interpret the husband as “Gaslighting” his wife? Had the husband seen that movie?

Another possible interpretation is that the author’s characters had minds of their own (like alternate personalities, not puppets), and this was how they insisted on doing things.

But I haven’t finished the novel yet, and maybe the protagonist’s sudden name change won’t look so bizarre when I do.

Same day:  Finishing, I found nothing worth adding. Search "Jane Eyre" for useful past posts, especially regarding Bertha's "familiar" (alternate personality).

1. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea [1966]. Edited by Judith L. Raskin. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. 

“Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys (post 3): In Part Two, why is there another nameless narrator?

Part Two begins with Antoinette’s husband (Rochester in “Jane Eyre”) as a nameless narrator, which, a footnote indicates, the author did quite intentionally. But it would be a mistake to interpret his namelessness as a literary device or as due to the author’s antagonism toward the “Rochester” character. Recall that the Part One narrator, Antoinette, had also been nameless (initially).

As discussed in a number of past posts—search “nameless,” “namelessness,” and “nameless narrator”—it is one indication that the author’s creative process may have involved multiple personality, because namelessness is common among alternate personalities, and, even when they do have names, it may be the last thing about themselves that they want to divulge.

1. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea [1966]. Edited by Judith L. Raskin. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

“Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys (2): Identity issues

This is a very short, 103-page novel (1) in which the early pages include people close to the protagonist in her childhood, so it is peculiar that the protagonist’s name, Antoinette, is not mentioned until page thirty-one.

Earlier than that, on page sixteen, the protagonist says, “Watching the red and yellow flowers in the sun thinking of nothing, it was as if a door opened and I was somewhere else. Not myself any longer.”

Comment: In this “Jane Eyre” prequel, the protagonist has identity issues before Rochester renames her Bertha and keeps her in the attic. However, while Antoinette/Bertha may have had multiple personality disorder (I’ll see when I read further), the author, like most admired novelists, probably had multiple personality trait (see prior post).

1. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea [1966]. Edited by Judith L. Raskin. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Jean Rhys (post 1): Best known as author of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), is said to have identity issues

I plan to read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

“She is a writer of many identities and aspects” (1, p. xi).

“Jean Rhys was a pen name…She was christened Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams…Gwendolen is the spelling on her tombstone, and the one she used in her autobiography…she hated the name Gwendolen (which she learned means white in Welsh), just as she hated being the palest of her siblings: they had brown eyes and hair, and she had blue eyes, fair skin and lighter hair… 

“Dominica, where she was born… still a wildly beautiful island…was a colony of Britain with a long history of slavery and white English hegemony. But, unusually in the Caribbean at the time, this was challenged by a powerful, mixed race elite…She was perhaps of mixed race, not uncommon among Creoles, but an issue for Rhys’s mother’s family, who liked to think their bloodline was only English…Rhys’s father was Welsh.” 

“She had a dark-skinned nurse, Meta, who often played on her child’s credulity, and told her terrifying stories of spirits and demons…Rhys was contradictory about race…there is a sense of forbidden love across racial caste lines…in Wide Sargasso Sea. Then, in the Black Exercise Book, she wrote of being sexually and psychologically abused by an old Englishman, Mr. Howard…The narrative of a young female victim of sexual abuse is clearly one source of the sexual inhibition or emotional masochism that most of Rhys’s protagonists display…” (1, pp. 1-4).

“Rhys adopted a first name as her writing name, which, depending on the context, could signify either gender (Jean as French is a man’s name, and as English a woman’s)” (1, p. 19).

“Rhys’s major characters often have a contradictory and hardly stable sense of self” (1, p. 22).

1. Elaine Savory. The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

“Bel Canto” by Ann Patchett (post 3): What makes novels a great read? 

The appendix to this edition of Bel Canto (1) includes “Ann Patchett’s Ten Great Reads,” which includes two novels discussed in this blog: The Ambassadors by Henry James and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. 

The title of The Ambassadors is plural, because the protagonist has "double consciousness" (multiple personality). And Anna Karenina is thrown under the train by her alternate personality (as explained in past posts).

In contrast, Bel Canto does not have any characters with prominent multiple personality issues, but it was award-winning and based on a real life event (2), which might impress some readers.

1. Ann Patchett. Bel Canto [2001]. New York, Harper Perennial Olive Edition, 2010.

2. Wikipedia. Bel Canto (novel). 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_Canto_(novel)

“Bel Canto” by Ann Patchett (post 2): How can one of Patchett’s characters recall something to which he had not paid attention?

After one of Patchett’s characters has missed most of what another character has said to him, “he stopped and made himself recall the entire sentence. He could do that. It was as if he had a tape recorder in his head” (1, p. 253).

1. Ann Patchett. Bel Canto [2001]. New York, Harper Perennial Olive Edition, 2010.

The following past post explains how such a thing could be possible.

2018

“The Red House Mystery” by A. A. Milne (author of “Winnie-the-Pooh”): Novel may reflect author’s multiple memory banks, typical of multiple personality

At the beginning of this novel, Antony—an amateur detective, who eventually solves the murder mystery—mentions that he has an eidetic or photographic memory.

But since it turns out that this talent is not essential to solving the mystery, and is not mentioned in most of the rest of the novel, why is it in this novel at all?

And it is a very peculiar kind of photographic memory, for it seems to involve two memory banks, with one of them recording memories outside the awareness of the other, which you would expect to find only in persons with multiple personality.

“Antony…had a wonderfully retentive mind. Everything he saw or heard seemed to make its corresponding impression somewhere in his brain; often without his being conscious of it; and these photographic impressions were always ready for him when he wished to develop them” (1, p. 23).

“Well, I can’t explain it, whether it’s something in the actual eye, or something in the brain, or what, but I have got a rather uncanny habit of recording things unconsciously…I mean my eyes seem to do it without the brain consciously taking part.” (1, p. 58).

He gives an example of remembering how many steps there are at the entrance to a building that he had previously visited. His regular memory would not know how many steps there had been, but if he now wanted to know, then his other memory bank would provide him with a photographic image of the steps, allowing him to count them (1, p. 58).

These multiple memory banks are suggestive of multiple personality, in which the host personality is helped by an alternate personality, who has remembered things that the regular personality had not.

And since neither the plot nor character development of this novel requires the protagonist to have this, it probably reflects the author’s own mentality.

Search “gratuitous multiple personality” for previous discussions.

1. A. A. Milne. The Red House Mystery [1922]. Smoking Gun Mystery Books, 2017. 

“Bel Canto” by Ann Patchett: Author’s most celebrated novel (1) describes, in passing, a purported method of child sexual abuse

“He had lived his life as a good father but now Oscar Mendoza saw again his life as a boy. A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost…Oscar himself had made too many girls forget their better instincts and fine training by biting them with tender persistence at the base of their skull, just where the hairline grew in downy wisps. Girls were like kittens in this way, if you got them right at the nape of their neck they went easily limp. Then he would whisper his suggestions, all the things they might do together…His voice traveled like a drug dripped down the spiraling canals of their ears until they had forgotten everything, until they had forgotten their own names, until they turned and offered themselves to him, their bodies sweet and soft as marzipan. Oscar shuddered at the thought" (2, pp. 151-152).

Comment: Most persons with multiple personality have a history of childhood trauma (such as, but not necessarily, child sexual abuse). Why is this well-written passage in the book? Does it contribute to the plot or character development, or did it have a personal meaning for the author?

Search “Patchett” for posts on other works.

1. Wikipedia. Bel Canto (novel). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_Canto_(novel)

2. Ann Patchett. Bel Canto [2001]. New York, Harper Perennial Olive Edition, 2010.

“Psycho” by Robert Bloch (post 3): Protagonist has some multiple personality symptoms, but a diagnostically unclear conclusion

I would not recommend this novel to learn about multiple personality.

1. Robert Bloch. Psycho [1959]. New York, The Overlook Press, 2021.

“Psycho” by Robert Bloch (post 2): Woman who will stop at Norman Bates’ motel hears the voice of her own italics-rendered alternate personality

After Mary Crane steals money and takes a wrong turn in her getaway car, the voice of her alternate personality says, in italics, “Get a grip on yourself now. You can’t afford to be panicky…

“It was true, she told herself. The worst part was over. The worst part had come yesterday afternoon, when she stole the money” (1, p. 17).

Comment: Why does this character have multiple personality, too? Possibly because it reflects the multiple personality trait of the author, who, judging by himself, considers it ordinary psychology.

However, Mary, like the author, would have only multiple personality trait; whereas, Norman, who is mentally ill, has multiple personality disorder.

Search “italics” for discussion of similar use of italics by other writers.

1. Robert Bloch. Psycho [1959]. New York, The Overlook Press, 2021.

“Psycho” by Robert Bloch (post 1): As novel begins, protagonist has at least three personalities

Norman Bates argues with “Mother,” who demeans him as a forty-year-old “Mamma’s Boy.” However, rendered in italics, another voice advises him: "She’s an old woman, and not quite right in the head. If you keep on listening to her this way, you’ll end up not quite right in the head, either. Tell her to go back to her room…And she’d better go there fast, because if she doesn’t, this time you’re going to strangle her…"(1, p. 16).

Comment: So far, the novel differs from Hitchcock's movie in two ways. In the novel, Norman has more than two personalities, as do most people with multiple personality. Also, he is "plump" (like Hitchcock), unlike the actor Hitchcock cast for the part.

1. Robert Bloch. Psycho [1959]. New York, The Overlook Press, 2021.

Alfred Hitchcock: With films like “Psycho,” “Rebecca,” and “Strangers on a Train,” his biography’s index should have included “multiple personality”

Even Wikipedia knows that Norman Bates in Psycho has multiple personality (1). My past posts on the authors of novels Rebecca and Strangers on a Train explain why I think they involve multiple personality, too. So I’m surprised to see that the index of a recent biography on Hitchcock has no entry for split personality or multiple personality (2).

Hitchcock’s making multiple movies based on novels involving multiple personality doesn’t necessarily mean that he, personally, had multiple personality, but it should have been enough to arouse a biographer’s interest and the interest of reviewers of that biography.

Search “Patricia Highsmith” (Strangers on a Train), “Daphne du Maurier” (Rebecca) and “Rebecca.”  [a related novelist, George du Maurier, wrote the multiple personality novel, Trilby, introducing the famous character, Svengali]

1. Wikipedia. "Psycho (novel)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_(novel)

2. Edward White. The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense. New York, W. W. Norton, 2021.

Why would anyone think multiple personality is rare? [originally posted 2014]

Since all humans are members of the same species, most things that are found in any one person are also found in many other people.

Conditions are rarely diagnosed for three reasons:

1. Rare genetic disorders

2. Special Situations: including infections, weather, diet, toxins, radiation, trauma, culture, and fads.

3. Diagnostic ignorance

Most skeptics do not claim that multiple personality does not exist. They admit that there have been valid cases. All they claim is that valid cases are rare, because, they say, it is a culturally-bound phenomenon and a recent fad.

But the fact is that multiple personality and other dissociative conditions are not culture-bound. They occur all over the world (1).

Is multiple personality a recent fad or a modern artifact? Well, “demon possession” has been reported since biblical times. So if you think that multiple personality is a recent fad, you have to believe in demons.

Then, if multiple personality is neither a rare genetic disease nor culture-bound nor a recent invention, is its alleged rarity a matter of diagnostic ignorance? Who are these skeptics who allege that multiple personality is rare? Not the American Psychiatric Association, whose diagnostic manual, DSM-5, says that the prevalence of multiple personality disorder (called “dissociative identity disorder”) is greater than the prevalence of schizophrenia.

Then who are these skeptics? They are people who, if you ask them, will admit that they, themselves, have never made the initial diagnosis of even one of those allegedly rare, but valid, cases. They are people who—no matter how otherwise brilliant or expert—have never demonstrated diagnostic expertise in regard to multiple personality.

Do you need diagnostic expertise? Is multiple personality the only disorder in the diagnostic manual that is relatively common, but rarely diagnosed? Another example is body dysmorphic disorder. The diagnosis is usually missed, because, like multiple personality, people who have it rarely volunteer their symptoms.

I have addressed skepticism about multiple personality before, and made other points—regarding normal childhood psychology; how the symptoms are usually camouflaged and kept secret; and how the Freudian model of the mind tricks people into thinking that multiple personality is logically impossible—but I think it is worthwhile to revisit skepticism from time to time, because prejudice against multiple personality is so common, and the skeptics think that they are so enlightened and clever.

1. George F. Rhoades Jr PhD and Vedat Sar MD (Editors). Trauma and Dissociation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Not Just a North American Phenomenon. New York, Haworth Press, 2005.

Afraid of You, Multiple Personality Hides, But Leaves Clues

One kind of clue is out-of-character behavior and puzzling inconsistency.

Another clue is a memory gap, which occurs when one personality does not recall what happened during the period of time that another personality was in control. For example, an emergency room patient may know why she is there, because she sees the bandage on her wrist, but if asked if she actually recalls cutting her wrist, she may not. If the time of a memory gap includes travel, it is called a “dissociative fugue,” like the famous, real-life experience of Agatha Christie.

Another clue may be pseudonyms: multiple names, nicknames, and spellings of names that are privately meaningful. Novelist Ernest Hemingway had about twenty (search Hemingway). Pseudonyms may be names of alternate personalities, but you may not realize it until the personalities feel their cover has been blown and they actually admit, in conversation with you, their separate senses of personhood.

Persons with multiple personality may see alternate personalities when they look in a mirror. Such mirror experiences and the secrecy of the names of alternate personalities may be the basis of fairy tales like Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin. Occupations that call for multiple identities include spies, acting, fiction writing, and confidence men (search posts on acting and novels involving those occupations).

Multiples (persons with multiple personality) may hear voices of alternate personalities in their head, and may even argue with them.

Multiples may get a reputation as liars, because different personalities may believe and remember different things.

Multiples may have episodes of childlike (not simply childish) behavior, due to child-aged alternate personalities.

In short, multiple personality is obvious once you learn the names of alternate personalities and can call them out to speak with you, but prior to that, you need to recognize clues.

Literary Review Standards: The case of the protagonist who forgot how to drive

Rose loved to drive, had to drive, because “I had found a tightness in my chest. Some nights it woke me up, and I would lie there, taking shallow breaths…The only time it seemed to go away was when I was driving” (1, p. 31).

When she found out she was pregnant, she decided not to tell her husband or her mother or where she was going, but simply planned to drive far away, out of state, to a home for unwed mothers.

The puzzling inconsistency of her driving skills is notable: “After I left the doctor’s office, after he had shaken my hand and said congratulations, I drove the car out onto the freeway and couldn’t remember how to drive. I pulled over into the breakdown lane and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel…I kept thinking, someone is going to open the passenger side door and tell me what to do…but no one came” (1, pp. 33-34).

Comment: In multiple personality, alternate personalities may differ in their skills. One personality may know how to drive, but another personality may not. Did the author know this? Had she had puzzling inconsistencies in her own skills? If a review of this novel (2) fails to note the protagonist’s definite symptom of multiple personality, the review is inadequate.

1. Ann Patchett. The Patron Saint of Liars [1992]. New York, Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

2. Alice McDermott. “A Sense of the Miraculous.” New York Times. July 26, 1992. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/books/a-sense-of-the-miraculous.html

“The Sun Also Rises” (post 3) by Ernest Hemingway: Bizarre Opening

The most outstanding and bizarre feature of this novel is the beginning of its first page with the name and backstory of Robert Cohn, an interesting, but secondary, Jewish character.

Why doesn’t the novel begin with the first-person protagonist, Jacob Barnes, and/or his love interest, Lady Brett Ashley, the two characters at the novel’s end?

Hemingway may have thought that a Jew and antisemitism would be an attention-getting opening, which it may have been, but it appears to me that the author felt he had things to hide and was afraid to discuss himself.

1. Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises [1926]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2022.

“The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway: Psychological Questions

Jake, the protagonist, is said to have sexual impotence from having gone to war (WWI), but to what extent was his impotence caused by psychological trauma, and what other psychological or gender issues might he have?

In the last sentence of the novel, Jake says, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” But why does this man use the word “pretty”? Is it sexist ridicule of Lady Brett Ashley for what he considers her feminine foolishness? Or is he accidentally revealing his own femininity?

Comment: My past posts on Hemingway’s posthumous novel The Garden of Eden raised the possibility of his having multiple personality, which often includes both male and female alternate personalities. 

1. Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises [1926]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2022. 

Ernest Hemingway: Before reading his first novel

My past posts on Hemingway mainly concerned his posthumous novel, The Garden of Eden, which, I found, clearly involves multiple personality of both the main female character and the main male character, a novelist.

Now, in planning to read Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, I am somewhat taken aback by the fact that its male protagonist, Jake, is said to be impotent (from war injuries). I can see how this might be symbolic of WWI’s “lost generation,” but it still seems rather odd for a male novelist’s first novel, especially a novelist later known for his macho public persona.