Many people do not know the theme of the double, and of those who do, many do not know it is a literary metaphor for multiple personality

As noted in a past post, many dictionaries of literary terms do not have an entry for “the Double” or “Theme of the Double.” Here is the entry from one dictionary that has it. But note the glaring omission: It does not mention that “the Double” is a literary metaphor for multiple personality. 

Dictionary Definition with Glaring Omission

“Double, the: A device whereby a character is self-duplicated (the Doppelgänger, “mirror image,” or “alter ego”), as in the case of Leggatt and the Captain in Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, or divided into two distinct, usually antithetical, personalities, as in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which objectifies the internal struggle of good and evil.

“Masao Miyoshi…outlines three categories of the Double:…an author’s conscious use of the device to express the theme of a work;…thematic…self-alienation…; and the biographical…revelation of the author’s own…divisions…

“The widespread use of the Double in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature (e.g., Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Dostoevsky's The Double, Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and John Knowles’s A Separate Peace) suggests to many critics the increasing awareness that the ‘self ’ is in reality a composite of many ‘selves’…” (1).

What is a Multiple Personality or “Double” story?

In this blog, when I call something “a multiple personality story,” I mean that it has a character who has multiple personality or that it is a “double” story and has one of the following literary, multiple personality, equivalents:

One character is an incarnation of another character’s alternate personality.

One character expresses hidden or denied aspects of another character.

One character is complementary to, or completes, another character.

One character is a duplicate of another character.

One character is the alter ego of another character.

One character is the evil twin of another character.

One character switches identities with another character.

One character is a creation of another character.

[Added April 24, 2015: Also, I may call something "a multiple personality story" if it has features typical of multiple personality, such as the children in Peter Pan who never grow up (which are like child-aged alternate personalities, who never grow up) or characters with no name (many alternate personalities are not named) or characters who are peculiarly unreliable (which most alternate personalities are, due to their limited perspective).]

1. Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz. Literary Terms: A Dictionary. Third Edition. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.