Reviews for The Double

The average rating for The Double based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-19 00:00:00 Michael Currie Through the bureaucratic ocean of papers, there lies Josef K., bored with unanswered arguments. Behind an unapologetic desk, Bartleby sits in silence, preferring nothing. As a fearful door opens, Bashmachkin leaves the smothering atmosphere of the office, ready to meet with the others. All set to forget the tasteless morning coffee and the men trying to make their way through scheme and flattery, and recover the humanity once lost. The sun is setting. A gentle breeze with a scent of independence caresses their faces. Golyadkin, our protagonist, is waiting for them. The world of the oppressed rests in Dostoyevsky's prose. The essential analyst of the human nature. Briefly, The Double is about Mr. Golyadkin and his doppelgänger, Mr. Golyadkin Jr., someone who has been born under a stressful snowstorm. This novella has many elements that can be found in Gogol's work. His influence on Dostoyevsky is well-known. However, this writer dealt with those same themes with an innovative style that traces clear boundaries. He even did that with his own work. For me, this was nothing like the novels I have read before. Universal themes like oppression, sorrow, alienation, work and loneliness are always treated from different angles and original ways of execution. Originality perceived by the mind of Sábato: we all are the sum of what we have read. Topics don't change; the way we deal with them might. When I read The Brothers Karamazov, my eyes contemplated Dostoyevsky's genius, word by word. My copy is all written. I highlighted hundreds of sentences that tried to enlighten the intricate path toward the mind. A modest attempt at understanding. However, the times I underlined something on The Double was for the main purpose of keeping up with the story. Actions. Names. I din't find many memorable reflections that left me at awe. The ones I found were at the beginning, mostly. So, what then? It was all in the interpretation. The development of facts, the story itself was what left me staring at an invisible point, drawing in the air, pondering about my own existence and the futility of things. The fragility of one of the most precious things we own. Our mind. A set of cognitive faculties. A place. A process. Sanity. His position at that moment was like the position of a man standing over a frightful precipice, when the earth breaks away under him, is rocking, shifting, sways for a last time, and falls, drawing him into the abyss, and meanwhile the unfortunate man has neither the strength nor the firmness of spirit to jump back, to take his eyes from the yawning chasm; the abyss draws him, and he finally leaps into it himself, himself hastening the moment of his own perdition. (39) We cannot own our mind. Under certain circumstances'sad, nerve wracking, shameful circumstances', it reacts as it pleases. Or the best way it can. It is the main source of who we are and yet, a trivial fact has the power to break it. A single act. An accumulation of traumatic acts. A life of unfortunate events. A pile of obedient frustrations. The meek silence of unwanted, inevitable solitude. The desire of success in a suffocating environment with people that have already been chosen over you. The search of identity in an alienated world. You can't be alone too much. These are just some of the observations that emerge from The Double, a true work of art that portrays a man's psychological struggle using a brushstroke of unforgiving reality. We are placed inside Golyadkin's head. We are privileged spectators of his mind. We see it work. We see it weep. We see it shocked, unable to move. We shout, because we know what to do (even though we probably would react the same way if we were in his shoes, you never know). A privilege that thrills and frightens. There's much emotion in Dostoyevsky's descriptive and cautious writing. So much, it's difficult to bear. Sep 29, 15 * Note: Months ago, I watched a 2013 film starring Jesse Eisenberg, based on this novella. Artistically exquisite. Keep it in mind! ** Also on my blog.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-02-08 00:00:00 Angel Jenkins Nabokov considered this "Dostoyevsky's best work," but, then again, Nabokov didn't like Dostoyevsky: he also called the novella "an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose." "The Double" is indeed a great work, though far from Dostoyevsky's greatest (too full of repetitions, verbal and structural, too often willfully obscure), and'I would argue'it is great precisely because of the manner in which it obviously and shamelessly imitates Gogol. In "The Double," the twenty-five year old Dostoyevsky sought to discover his own path as a writer by imitating'to the point of parody'the style and themes of Gogol, a writer he dearly loved. He took Gogol's typical protagonist'a middle class bureaucrat of the rank of "titular councillor'and speculated: how would a Gogol hero like this'a lonely egoist obsessed with rank, humiliated by slights, isolated in suspicion and near poverty'react if he encountered a man who looked and acted exactly like himself and who began, little by little, to take over his life, his apartment, his acquaintances, even his duties as titular councillor? Dostoyevsky concluded such a man would certainly go mad, and decided to document'from the protagonist's point of view'his agonized descent into delusion. In his exaggerated imitation of Gogol, Dostoevsky so thoroughly identifies with the councillor's point of view that his "parody" becomes an implied criticism. Gogol'as he did in "The Overcoat," "The Nose," and "The Diary of a Madman"'would have abased his hero, ridiculed him, exploited him as a figure of fun and as an excuse for violent shifts in tone and mood, all the psychological insight he possessed subordinate to satiric intent and dramatic effect. Dostoyevsky however was too compassionate a writer, too empathetic a man, to objectify his hero in this way. Instead, he identifies with him thoroughly, creates an experience so immediate and so real that the reader is forced to experience the consciousness of a madman, alternately consumed by shame and filled with elation, disoriented and alienated in a hostile and ambiguous world. Where Gogol would have presented the reader with an absurd situation, a philosophical dilemma, Dostoevsky instead immerses him in a psychological crisis. And this psychological crisis, for those familiar with Dostoevsky's later work, hints at the existential and theological crises yet to come.