Is No Longer Human about BPD—and should we even ask that question?

Can we diagnose the narrator of Osamu Dazai’s novel, No Longer Human, with BPD or some other diagnosis? And does it make sense to try? In this bonus summer solo episode, I give my perspective as a Japanese literature scholar and a person with BPD.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

Shirley Dent, “Don’t ‘Diagnose’ Fictional Characters”

Jared D. Fife, “Stuff Psychologists Like—#1. Diagnosing Fictional Characters”

Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession

Cynthia Gralla, “Suicide Contagion and the Risks of Literature”

Cynthia Gralla, “Dream Girls Gotta Have Agency”

Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs, Heaven, and All the Lovers in the Night

Craig M. Klugman and Carol Levine, “Diagnosing Shosha: Literature As a Lens to View Disease and History”

Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”

Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan

Narrative medicine at Columbia University