“The Double” by José Saramago (post 5): Novel’s narrators, who say they are mere transcribers of characters’ thoughts and actions, may be doubles, too.

A little more than halfway through this novel, the protagonist, a divorced history teacher, has contacted his double, a married movie actor. After comparing physical details, they do not doubt that they are duplicates, which they see as strange, but a fact.

As previously noted, one of the outstanding things about this novel, right from its beginning, is the narrator’s plural self-reference. I have looked at the discussion of this novel in Wikipedia, and have read several book reviews, including one by a famous novelist, but none notes the narrator’s plurality.

At this point in the novel, the married actor is wondering if he can profit from the fact that he and the divorced history teacher cannot be told apart, even by people, like the history teacher’s girlfriend, who know them intimately. The narrator refuses to give a hint as to how this will work out:

“…do not count on us, mere transcribers of other people’s thoughts and faithful copyists of their actions, to anticipate the next steps…” (1, p. 189).

The idea that the writer of a novel is a “mere transcriber” of a story that other personalities have provided is a relatively familiar idea that other writers have expressed, too. For example, Cormac McCarthy, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, said he has “a sense of taking dictation” from “a committee” (search “cormac oprah”).

Less noted, but surprisingly common, is the fact that the narrative voice of a novel may be plural. For example, I have noted that some novels seem to have different writers for their first and second halves, with a character portrayed as having multiple personality in the first half, but with the issue of multiple personality completely forgotten in the second half (e.g., Graham Greene’s The Third Man and Joyce Carol Oates’ You Must Remember This). Other novels, famous for being difficult to read, skip from one narrator to another.

However, Saramago’s The Double is the first novel I’ve noted to have one consistent narration that makes plural self-reference, implying that the narrator is a consistent combination of personalities. And since these personalities have not spoken up and said they are different from each other, it may be that they are doubles like the two characters.

1. José Saramago. The Double [2002]. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. Orlando, Harcourt, 2004.