The Double (1846)

The Double has a distinct resemblance to Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman (1835).  Both chronicle a man’s descent into delusion, both are energized by curiosity about the experience of psychosis. Yet the readerly experiences they offer are about as similar as watching a bullfight on TV to being eye to eye with the bull in the arena.

The difference lies in the narrator.  Gogol tells his story through an unreliable narrator.  This narrator, the madman himself, makes claims that Gogol meanwhile contradicts through the reactions of others, the narrator’s slips of tongue, and clashing circumstances.  Thus Gogol trains me to have a sense of the reality of the novel apart from what the narrator tells me, and I enjoy my superior knowledge.  By the time hallucination swallows the narrator whole, I can marvel at his craziness from a safe distance.  

Dostoevsky’s narrator is much more bizarre.  The story is written in the third person, so apparently the narrator is not Goliadkin. Yet the narrator is at times so close to Goliadkin that the narrator’s words clearly belong to Goliadkin.  When the hero is hiding in a backroom trying to decide whether or not to crash a party, the narrator says, “Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, waiting now for this quiet, and he has been waiting exactly two and a half hours for it.  Why should he not wait?”  That last question clearly comes from Goliadkin—no objective person would think his behavior a good idea.  Again, when the Double jumps in a cab, the narrator tells us that the driver “was obviously in full complicity with him.”  There is no indication that the driver would be complicit with the Double—such a reality would be an absurdity.  The assumption only makes sense in light of Goliadkin’s paranoia.  The narrator is not expressing reality here, but Goliadkin’s take on it.

The narrator at times seems like he only has access to Goliadkin’s perspective and nothing else.  When Goliadkin is on a bridge looking down at the Fontanka, the narrator says, 

It is not known precisely how much time he spent in this occupation.  It is known only that at that moment Mr. Goliadkin reached such despair, was so broken, so tormented, so exhausted and sagging in what remained of his spirit, which was weak to begin with, that he forgot everything. . .

The narrator does not know even such simple external details as the passage of time—the narrator only knows Goliadkin’s internal state.  

If the narrator always remained this close to Goliadkin, The Double would have a much similar effect to Diary of a Madman.  I would get used to the idea that I am only given the information in Goliadkin’s head and learn to grasp clues for the reality beyond it.  But Dostoevsky does not afford me this luxury.  He complicates matters by giving the narrator a much more fluid perspective.

At times, the narrator indulges in sharing knowledge entirely outside of Goliadkin’s view.  Check this out: “Our hero failed to notice that he was at the present moment the object of the exclusive attention of all those in the room.”  And again: “He rushed to the window and, with great concern, began searching with his eyes for something in the courtyard on which the windows of his apartment gave.  Apparently whatever he was searching for in the yard also satisfied him completely; his face lit up with a self-satisfied smile.”  In both instances, there is a marked separation between narrator and protagonist.  

Okay, so the narrator is capable of dipping into Goliadkin’s head and coming out again.  I’d call that fluid but not bizarre.  That is, until I read the description of the Klara’s birthday party.  Here the narrator details a scene at which Goliadkin is absent.  This is the first time I get to experience the narrator without Goliadkin, so I am curious to see what the narrator’s like.  But I soon find that the portrait is oddly contradictory.  The narrator at first seems overawed by the party’s splendor.  He repeatedly says that only a genius could chronicle the party justly.  Yet he goes so overboard with this verbal worship that it falls into sarcasm.  His tone becomes decidedly satirical in passages like these: 

How can I portray this extraordinary and decorous mixture of beauty, brilliance, decency, gaiety, amiable solidity and solid amiability, friskiness, joy, all the games and laughter of all these official ladies, more like fairies than ladies—speaking in a sense advantageous to them—with their lily-and-rose shoulders and faces, their airy waists, and their friskily playful, homeopathic (speaking in high style) little feet?

But what kind of satire is this?  The absurdity lies more on the chronicler than on the ladies.  The tone is too sincere to be entirely absurd and too absurd to be entirely sincere.  It’s both.  It’s simultaneously fawning and defiant.  Yet this paradoxical tone is not unfamiliar to the reader.  It is the exact stance of Goliadkin on such occasions.  

In other words, at the precise moment when the narrator shows himself to be a distinct personality from Goliadkin, he nonetheless channels Goliadkin’s attitude.  It’s as if the narrator both is and isn’t Goliadkin—as if he were another double.

Dostoevsky’s decision to create such a paradoxical narrator is significant because the action of the story revolves around the fantastic escapades of Goliadkin’s doppelgänger.  When I start the novel, I chug along the first few pages thinking, “This book has a realistic style—I’m expecting a realistic storyline,” and then in walks a doppelgänger.  This presents me with a question: is the doppelgänger real or is Goliadkin going crazy?  But I am barred from an answer due to the paradoxical nature of the narrator.  He describes the Double as if he were real.  But when the narrator gives these descriptions, are they from Goliadkin’s perspective, thus indicating they are Goliadkin’s hallucination?  Or are they descriptions given from a perspective outside of Goliadkin, thus indicating that I am reading a fantasy novel?  The narrator is too slippery to give me a clear answer.  

I still want to know what’s going on, so I look to the circumstances to see if they confirm whether the Double is real or a delusion.  Yet the circumstances themselves seem contradictory.  Almost all of Goliadkin’s conversations with other people are framed in such a way that the Double could be a hallucination.  The others seem confused and never answer directly when Goliadkin brings him up.  But there is one maddening exception.  When Goliadkin speaks to Anton Antonovich, Anton acknowledges that someone also named Goliadkin just started working at the office, and that the man has a striking resemblance to Goliadkin Sr.  This makes me think that the Double is real.  Yet the conversation is still so enigmatic that I remain uncertain.  

There are also strange circumstances that make me distrust the story as a whole, yet I have no reference point for the reality of the situation.  Krestyan Ivanovich, for example, has a thick German accent at the end of the novel, which he does not have at the beginning.  Is this an indication of Goliadkin’s descent into delusion?  He does seem to have paranoia about Germans.  Also, Anton Antonovich tells Goliadkin that the Double took the job of someone named Semyon Ivanovich.  Later on in the book, the porter tells him that someone named Ivan Semyonovich took Goliadkin’s job.  The weird symmetry of these names feels absurd—like they are the creations of a disturbed mind.  Yet again, I have no access to a saner reality.

But how does Dostoevsky pull it off?  Normally such blatant contradictions in a novel would push me out of the story rather than pull me deeper in.  Yet I found myself loving this book.

First, Dostoevsky assures us of his reliability as an author through the structure of the novel.  The events are set up in a pleasant chiasma.  Here is a rough sequence of Goliadkin’s interactions:

1.  His doctor

2.  His boss’s boss and daughter

3.  His double

4.  His boss’s boss and daughter

5.  His doctor

The ordered mirror of the plot centering around the Double gives me a sense that the author knows what he’s doing, that what feels like chaos is actually intentional.

Second, Dostoevsky woos me into such a paradoxical world through his use of gothicism.  Gothic storytelling has long been the home of the uncanny—that feeling when I’m not sure if something is real or not.  

Staples of gothicism are large, grotesque houses and stormy weather.  Goliadkin lives in such a house, and he first encounters the Double during a snowstorm.  Because so many stories of the uncanny take place in such environments, the setting trains me to expect a blurring of reality, which is much how the end of the novel feels with Goliadkin’s long, delirious monologues.  If I had to pick an adjective for this book it would be “uncanny,” which is most vividly shown when Goliadkin encounters the shoes of his boss’s boss:

Here, in his perplexity, he lowered his eyes to the ground and, to his extreme amazement, saw considerable white spots on his excellency’s boots.  ‘Can they have split open?’ thought Mr. Goliadkin.  Soon, however, Mr. Goliadkin discovered that his excellency’s boots were not split open at all, but only had bright reflections—a phenomenon explained completely by the fact that the boots were of patent leather and shone brightly.  “That’s called a highlight,” thought our hero.  “The term is used especially in artists’ studios; elsewhere this reflection is called a bright gleam.”

When I read The Double, I long for reality but am unable to find it, unlike in Diary of a Madman.  Gogol gives me a spectator seat for psychosis—Dostoevsky gives me a direct experience.