“The Double” by José Saramago (post 7): Highlights of Memoir and Novel, comments on ending, two facts for book reviews, and two intriguing questions.

Memoir

In his memoir (as previously discussed), this Nobel Prize winning novelist says he’s had identity problems, because “Saramago” is not his real name: He says he has had to use this name, because it was written in on his birth registration by mistake.

He also says that during his childhood he was a compulsive liar. (Incidentally, one screening question for multiple personality in adults is to ask if they had a reputation for being a liar in childhood. Search “lying.”) And his history of having been a liar raises the question of whether his story about why he kept his second, erroneous surname is the truth.

In any case, his suddenly discovering at age seven (an impressionable age) that he had two surnames—de Sousa and Saramago—suggests that he, himself, psychologically speaking, may have become a double story.

The Double (his novel)

Like a person with multiple personality, the protagonist sometimes has dialogues with voices (alternate personalities) in his head.

The narrator’s continual, plural self-reference suggests that the narrator is composed of more than one personality. Indeed, one narrator personality describes itself as a modest transcriber, who wouldn’t know what will happen next in the story. While another narrator personality portrays itself as boldly opinionated, and omniscient about what will happen next, through to the last page.

And any story of identical doubles should be suspected of being a multiple personality story, because alternate personalities, sharing the same body, do, in fact, look identical.

At the end of the novel, the double dies in a car accident, but the protagonist is then confronted with the arrival of a new double, suggesting that the double scenario will keep repeating itself.

This ending could be considered a literary cliché, equivalent to a story about a secretary who displaces her boss’s wife, but then on the last page of the novel, a new secretary arrives at the office.

However, in the context of multiple personality, the meaning of the ending may relate to what is commonly seen by a therapist treating his first case of multiple personality. He has discovered one or two alternate personalities and thinks he has seen all there is, but then he discovers more personalities, layer after layer, and thinks it will never end. (The number of personalities will come to an end, and how many personalities there are is no more important than how many characters there are in a novel.)

Perhaps the ending of this novel reflects the author’s experience of having dealt with internal (alternate personality) rivals, only to find that there was always another one. But that, of course, is not a fact, only speculation.

Two facts relevant to any discussion of this novel are 1. that at age seven, the author suddenly discovered he had a second surname, raising the possibility that the author, himself, developed a double identity problem, and 2. that the narrator of this novel has two distinct personalities.

Did the author know that his narrator has two personalities? Did he understand the significance of his narrator’s continually making plural self-reference and describing himself in contradictory terms (here as a modest transcriber and there as boldly omniscient)? And why didn’t book reviews of this novel comment on the narrator’s multiple personality?

What is your opinion?