Post #3 on Dostoevsky’s The Double; Post #2 quoting Mikhail Bakhtin

“But who tells the story in The Double?…one gets the impression that the narration is dialogically addressed to Golyadkin himself, it rings in Golyadkin’s own ears as another’s voice taunting him, as the voice of his double, although formally the narration is addressed to the reader” (1, pp. 217-218).

As I previously said, the story is not really about Golyadkin’s downfall. It is about the double’s triumph. “History is written by the victors.” The double—the alternate personality—tells the story.

So Dostoevsky knows about alternate personalities who have minds of their own and can take over, perhaps in everyday life, but at least in writing.

1. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.