The Double

One of Dostoevsky’s lesser known works, The Double’s premise is profound. The protagonist Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is your everyday, average career man, but he deteriorates mentally and socially as he meets his doppelgänger, a man by the same name with the same face, but equipped with social skills and charisma that the original desperately lacked. Golyadkin’s double gains popularity as the original Golyadkin suffers from internal mental confusion and breakdowns as well as external faux pas with his friends and workers. The presentation of the story was very dense and it wasn’t the pleasantest short novel to read (more on that below). Yet as a psychological fiction, it’s provocative and touches on so many critical areas of our identity: coherence, social position, vanity, self-esteem – you and I can both find many relatable parts of ourselves in Golyadkin.

The story behind the haunting plot is really one about mental illness, more specifically schizophrenia; during Dostoevsky’s time, schizophrenia wasn’t understood at all but Dostoevsky still managed to give a convincing characterization of the disorder (even the term schizophrenia was coined almost 50 years after the book’s publication). Dostoevsky repeatedly gives hints that Golyadkin is seeing or remembering events that didn’t happen (or did they?). Even though Golyadkin himself isn’t narrating (the story is told in 3rd person), the narrator presents the story from Golyadkin’s psychological state; this story is another example of Dostoevsky’s use of the unreliable narrator and here this use is purposeful. As a reader, I was discomforted trying to make coherent sense of those incoherent events in Golyadkin’s life, and this discomfort is probably the exact effect Dostoevsky wanted; he’s woven a borderline-sadistic yet completely empathetic literary device throughout the entire novel.