Commentary On When Rabbit Howls By Truddi Chase

When Rabbit Howls is the story of a woman named Truddi Chase who suffered unspeakable sexual, physical, and mental abuse throughout her whole childhood. The book is written in third person, even though it is in fact an autobiography. The book is written not from the point of view of one coherent person, but from the individual thoughts of “the troop”, which is the name of the collective group of personalities that the one woman shares. As explained in the preface by Chase’s psychotherapist, “The troop members ‘see’ and ‘hear’ each other and carry on with one another that are real to them” (xxii). Because of the things that Truddi went through, she developed Dissociative Personality Disorder, which was previously known as Multiple Personality
While there had been other books written about people with multiple personalities before, it was novel that something had been written directly by the sufferer of the condition. What was even more remarkable about this piece is that the troop themselves had worked together to create it. There are whole sections of the book that the woman admits to not consciously having a memory of writing, which was a struggle she faced often in her everyday life. She is remarkable because she says that most of her therapy sessions consisted of “unconscious struggling to remain ‘surfaced’ and in control” (130). She did not know what it was inside of her that she was struggling against, but she did know on some level that she was not the little girl that was molested by the stepfather and abused by the mother. She knew that from that point on she had given herself over to The Troop, and they had been running the show ever since that moment when she was five years old and she could no longer remember anything but flickers of memories. She had come to terms with this, had accepted that she needed to live with the fragmented pieces of different people that her life had become. I personally like the quote, “’I’m blessed,’ she said. ‘No matter how bad things were as a child, it was always possible to hang in there until the next day, the next year. Why do I say that when I can’t remember what happened, just that I hated the farm?” (181). The woman is effectively recognizing The Troops as her coping mechanism, because they kept her from realizing the scope of the things that had been done to her and totally losing it. Her story was not just about the realizing of the condition, but about the accept of it, and of the coming to terms with the fact that The Troop were not multiple facets of the same person, but multiple people created from facets of the person that they used to live inside. The Troops