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Waking Without a Self to Trust: Dissociation, Confabulation, and Institutional Agency in Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes (2017) invites a phenomenological and clinical reading, as companion to a separate philosophical treatment of the same novel's structure of moral responsibility. Where that companion piece addresses what existing theories of personal identity and responsibility can and cannot accommodate, this paper asks a different question: what does the lived, first-person experience of the novel's central premise resemble, and what does existing clinical and phenomenological work on dissociation, confabulation, and moral injury allow us to say about it that a purely conceptual analysis does not? I argue that the crew's post-waking condition reproduces, without a traumatic or organic etiology, a phenomenological profile closely tracking clinical dissociative amnesia: a felt discontinuity between an intact sense of ownership over one's present body and a disrupted sense of agency over the actions that produced the current situation. I further argue that the characters' subsequent behavior, actively constructing partial narratives to explain their own possible guilt, mirrors confabulatory processes documented in memory-disorder literature, and that their affective responses resemble moral injury as characterized in trauma psychology, a condition in which guilt-like affect can arise independently of any settled fact of transgression. A final section situates this dissociative structure within the ship's caste-based labor hierarchy, arguing that the novel stages memory-wiping as an institutional technology of control whose phenomenological effects on subordinate crew are worth reading against existing clinical literature on dissociation under institutional constraint.
DOI: 10.17613/0tjez-35028
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7204101689
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