Double, double, toil and trouble: on self-consciousness in Dostoevsky’s The Double
Досс, Wikimedia Commons
by Pradz Sapre
Dostoevsky’s The Double recounts the psychological breakdown of Mr. Goliadkin within a world that seems entirely apathetic to his suffering. At one moment, the novel seems to be the tale of a man driven insane by the sociopathological inertia of life in St. Petersburg, the trappings of modernity, and the pitfalls of his position as a titular councillor in a claustrophobic hierarchy. At other moments, he appears the victim of a cruel, omnipotent authorial hand —conjuring blizzards, phantoms and doppelgangers in service of his humiliation. The likeliest explanation, however, is that Goliadkin may simply be removed from the realities of his external world, lost in the annals of his self-consciousness. What could an external world have to do with a man who is but a voice, permanently stuck in aporia, turning in on itself? This Bakhtinian position, the notion that “we see not who he is, but how he is conscious of himself” (48), that our act of artistic visualization “occurs not before the reality of the hero, but before a pure function of his awareness of that reality,” (48) reflects the idea that it is not the world he inhabits, but Goliadkin who is responsible for his own ruin. From the very outset of the novel, Goliadkin’s obsession with image and appearance bely a perennial concern about how he is perceived, ludicrously magnified during interactions with authority figures like doctor Krestyan Ivanovich. Upon closer reading, it emerges even in solitary moments, during which his internal self-dialogue is directed to an absent interlocutor who he hopes to impress. At no moment is he free from the gaze of an imagined other. But in a world mediated by his imagination, an “imagined” other threatens to exceed the bounds of the purely imaginary—moving from the confines of his mind to his perceived reality. As external reality begins to intrude upon the fictions he invents to pacify his insecurities, he becomes torn—between the false, conciliatory words of his self-dialogue and the part of himself that is forced to accept his humiliating circumstances. Eventually, Goliadkin’s anxieties render him so fragile, and his self-dialogue gains such ontological dominance that he undergoes a complete psychological split, dissociating into Goliadkin and Goliadkin Jr—his double. Goliadkin Jr is the externalization of his self-consciousness, the imagined other now reified, what Bakhtin terms “a second voice”; he is acutely aware of Goliadkin’s most painful anxieties but uses this knowledge to exploit Goliadkin’s insecurities rather than to pacify them. This essay traces the arc of Goliadkin’s self-consciousness in the novel in an attempt to elucidate the psychological mechanism by which it devastates him: what begins as a tendency to see his own image in the eyes of an imagined other becomes the crystallization of that other into something he can never become, an unattainable ideal, a perennial reminder of his inadequacy. His is the inevitable splitting of a self that becomes completely unmoored from reality, the enduring status of a disembodied voice, humiliated by the sound of its own echo.
Goliadkin’s first interaction with Krestyan Ivanovich is a stark depiction of his paralyzing self-consciousness, depicted by Dostoevsky through the breakdown of both Goliadkin’s language and physicality. Even before Goliadkin enters Krestyan Ivanovich’s clinic, he is plagued by the need for Ivanovich’s approval, suffocated by a desire to “say something most interesting to his doctor” (10) throughout his carriage ride. However, upon entering his clinic, he is too nervous to say anything interesting and musters a mere murmur. While the imagined judgement of this erudite physician rings loudly in his ears, his own words are soft and effaced — a mere murmur. He is tentative and uncertain: upon sitting down, he immediately gets up from his seat in embarrassment, and then “tried to excuse himself, murmured something, smiled, blushed, became embarrassed, fell into an expressive silence, and finally sat down.” (10). The asyndeton of these clauses and the swift listing of meaningless actions evokes a physical response , as he rapidly and unwittingly enacts a chain of actions, eventually losing complete control and falling back into his seat. Fifteen pages in, he is already withered by the gaze of another.
Goliadkin’s breakdown of language is also portrayed through speech that is rife with empty aphorisms. Throughout their conversation, instead of directly responding to Krestyan Ivanovich’s recommendations that he seek out entertainment and company, he defends himself from potential criticisms in roundabout declaratives — “I love quiet” (12), “The road of life is a broad one, Doctor” (13), “Peace is what I like, Doctor, not the tumult of society” (13). The objective of Goliadkin’s visit to a doctor is not the betterment of his quality of his life but the betterment of his image in the doctor’s eyes. As he stumbles over words, he justifies his broken syntax by claiming “I am no master of fine speaking” (13). As he continues to rationalize away the flaws he imagines others might see in him—timidity, reclusion, ineloquence—by proclaiming his love of solitude and simplicity, his false assurances reaches ludicrous proportions and he proclaims, “I am a little man, you know that yourself” (14). Like his earlier chain of physical mishaps, one self-rationalization falls right into the next, carried by logical momentum to the bombastic conclusion that “I am proud that I am a little man.” (14) As he boasts of his own insignificance, desperately mustering some empty self-confidence, he lapses into self-caricature.
Throughout the conversation, Goliadkin incessantly repeats “Krestyan Ivanovich”, the doctor’s name, almost as a linguistic crutch—both accentuating the stiltedness of his anxious, rambling speech and reminding the readers that his statements are, after all, directed towards Krestyan Ivanovich in an attempt to earn his respect. His self-deception, however, falls apart as soon as he sees Krestyan’s unmoved expression, culminating in a total physical and linguistic breakdown. His “chin quivers” and “his lip trembles” as he attempts to stem the overwhelming tide of his humiliation, on the brink of physical and emotional collapse. Soon after, he “bursts into sobs” (15) and is left “unable to say a word,” (15) having lost complete bodily control.
Goliadkin’s tendency to define himself through the perspective of others is certainly pernicious, especially because this is not just limited to real figures he encounters, extending even to imagined “others”. At the opening of the novel, Goliadkin wakes up, looks in the mirror and immediately goes to inspect his wallet. Upon seeing the wads of notes, he exclaims “a significant sum, an agreeable sum, quite an agreeable sum, an agreeable sum for anyone, I’d like to see the man for whom this sum would be negligible” (4). His repetition of the phrase “agreeable sum” four times suggests a desperate need to prove his wealth—which he clearly sees as a literalisation of his status. Moreover, the repetition is so gratuitous as to create a sense of paranoia, as if he is quashing the doubts of an absent interlocutor who might cast doubt on his social position. Ironically, such a figure likely does not exist in his social world—there likely is no man who feels the need to claim that this sum is “negligible”—but it is his proactive posturing that brings this interlocutor into existence, as the imagined “other” with whom he will polemicize throughout the novel.
Moreover, Goliadkin’s self-dialogue reflects an inability to confront his own failures, which becomes evident when he is driving in his carriage and comes across Andrei Filipovich, the head of the department at which he works. His frenetic interrogatives “Should I bow not? Should I respond or not?” (8) depict a moment of intense self-questioning and “indescribable anguish” (8) at what seems like a simple decision. Yet, this is followed by “I’m all right, it’s not me at all, not me and that’s that.” (8) Though, it clearly is him sitting in the carriage, he is most at ease in a world of self-denial. Moreover, the short, certain clauses and the declarative syntax of this self-dialogue imply the sense of conviction that he is trying to muster. He lurches between emotional extremes, here, cajoling himself and assuaging his intense distress with the notion that “that’s that” (8)— that no observing audience should pay any more attention to the matter, an audience that, again, is nothing but an invention of his self-anxiety. Moreover, the contrast between the “indescribable anguish” (8) he just felt and the unthinking simplicity of “that’s that” (8) reflects a tendency to greatly minimize affairs that, moments ago, held almost cosmic significance. Instead of confronting his failures and moving on from them once and for all, he represses and minimizes them, even hides from them—or rather hides them from the other that he imagines is always watching them.
The morning after the Petersburg blizzard when he decides to skip work, however, proclaiming “What do I care! I simply can’t go in such weather” (53), the fiction of his self-dialogue becomes apparent. The self-evident tone of “I simply can’t go” (53) suggests not only that his decision is facile, but that there could be no other option. And yet, as soon as th e narrator ironically notes that his conscience has finally been “salved” (53), Goliadkin “threw the pipe, briskly washed, shaved, smoothed his hair, flew off to the department” (53). Here, the listing of strong, active verbs and breakneck connotations of “flew off” highlight the urgency with which he rushes to work, his actions revealing his false assurances for what they really are. In his tenuous psychological state, he is unable to trust even himself. If all his assurances are meant to pacify an absent interlocutor, who is pacifying him?
Importantly, Dostoevsky highlights Goliadkin’s need to rationalize away imagined criticism as a trait that enkindles not only self-deception but also a disorientation with reality. For instance, he initially leaves his interaction with Andrei Filipovich perfectly content, convincing himself that it probably wasn’t even Andrei watching him from the carriage. However, a few moments later he “remembered that he had flunked it” and “cast a terrible, defiant glance into the front corner of the carriage” (8). The sudden remembrance suggests that he has been living in delusion, only later recognizing the reality of his circumstances. Similarly, he leaves Krestyan Ivanovich’s clinic “ready to acknowledge himself the happiest of mortals” (20), the superlative depicting the comedy of his situation. Yet, as the carriage clutters, a physical reminder of the world outside his mind, he “suddenly remembers everything” (20), as his personal reality is suddenly crushed by an external reality. This recurrent amnesia after moments of humiliation is a common coping mechanism for Goliadkin, and evidently an unsustainable one. Self-consciousness leaves Goliadkin’s world particularly fragile—marring his ostensible triumphs, and his very real failures.
At the scene of Klara Olsufyevna’s birthday dinner, Goliadkin’s self-consciousness and its pernicious manifestations finally coalesce, rendering his mental state so unstable that he undergoes a psychological split. At first, after being denied entry to the festivities, Goliadkin is unable to accept that he is unwelcome and finds himself in the back room. As he contemplates his situation, the simplicity of the narrator’s question “why not go in?” and the euphemism “he has only a step to go in and he will go in rather adroitly” (24) reflect the facile, facetious tone of Goliadkin’s own self-assurances, minimizing the act of breaking into a party as taking “a simple step”. (24) Parodied in the voice of another, the ridiculousness of his way of thinking becomes patent. When he eventually goes in, he is “moved forward as if someone has touched a spring” (34), seemingly propelled forward by an invisible force, no longer in control of his body. His physical movements are described as an out-of-body experience and he “ends up in front of Klara Olsufyevna” (37). As he explains himself in a speech to the crowd, he “falters and gets stuck, stuck and blushed, blushed and becomes flustered” (38). The anadiplotic repetition of ‘faltered’, ‘stuck’ and ‘blushed’ in a circular pattern enact the linguistic spiral down which he falls. Moreover, immediately after his disaster, he talks in whispers and mutters, whispering that he has nothing to be ashamed of, that it could have happened to anyone, muttering “why not?” (39, 40) With his once pompous proclamations — “I am proud that I am a little man” (15) — now reduced to whispers and mutters, it seems that his words and assurances have finally lost all their weight, and he is forced to confront their hollowness. Moreover, though his self-assurances are never questioned by his mental interlocutor in the privacy of his own home, when verbalized in the presence of other guests, they evidently ring untrue. There is nothing more dangerous for Goliadkin’s fragile reality than the guests’ disapproving glares– an external reality that threatens to crush his disintegrating internal one.
At the end of this cataclysmic humiliation, he finds himself expelled from the ball, but it is only after a significant delay, marked by the same recurrent amnesia, that “Mr Goliadkin suddenly remembered everything” (42). Finally, his fragile psyche, forced to confront the realities of a social, professional and romantic failure, is physically shattered. The language of the novel, too, reflects this fission. Goliadkin is described as “[tearing] himself from the spot when he has been standing”, with the physicality of the verb “tearing” suggesting his character has been violently and literally split into a character fleeing from himself and the shadow he leaves behind.
***
It is from this shadow and with this emotional context—the thorough failure of Goliadkin’s self-consciousness to protect him from humiliation by rationalizing away his flaws and failures—that Dostoevsky introduces Goliadkin’s double, Goliadkin Jr. This double, then, is an externalization of the absent interlocutor that Goliadkin finds himself cajoling and trying to impress in the first part of the novel: a watchful gaze, always looking inward, painfully aware of each anxiety. It is strengthened by each self-criticism that Goliadkin tries to anticipate, fuelled with ideas by Goliadkin’s need to reassure himself about things that do not need assurance. Though the novel never explains the appearance of his double, defying the limits of its realism with the suggestion that this all might just be in Goliadkin’s head, it remains plausible that his self-consciousness grew so acute the night of Klara Olsufyevna’s dinner that it took on, quite literally, a life of its own.
For a character like Goliadkin whose relationship with reality is already so strained, the double physically embodies his deepest anxieties about the line between real and counterfeit. After all, what anxiety could be more crushing to one’s self-esteem than the notion that they are dispensable? Simply the sight of his double, the fateful night of their first encounter, evokes an intense, visceral dread, as he is forced to compare himself to a man who is his perfect likeness. Dostoevsky’ description of the double – “he too was walking hastily”, “he too, like Mr Goliadkin, was dressed and wrapped from head to foot” (47) — grows progressively more eerie, with each recurrence of the anaphoric “he too” signalling a new, uncannier similarity between the two. What begins as a physical similarity is followed by the narrator's description of him as a man who would “draw no one’s special attention” (48). Remarkably, the double is described with the same qualities that the narrator once ascribed to Goliadkin and is imbued with the same nondescript essence. He is later described as “a man like everybody else” (49) and someone “who was his own man” (49)—adopting the same mantras that were solely Goliadkin’s thus far. Soon, Goliadkin himself wonders “if they had been taken and placed next to one another, no one, decidedly no one, would have undertaken to determine precisely which was the real Goliadkin and which was the counterfeit.” (55)
Though their first meeting is marked by an affectionate familiarity, as the novel progresses, the two Goliadkins naturally find themselves in antagonistic positions — as a voice and its distorted echo, an answer and its question. Where the double was once merely a parody of Goliadkin — of his gait, his walk and his essence as a man like any other — he soon adopts the role of his opposite. If all self-conscious self-criticism involves implicit comparison to an aspirational version of oneself, he represents the ideal that Goliadkin can never be, using his knowledge of Goliadkin’s insecurities to supplant him socially and professionally. Their contrast is only accentuated by the juxtaposition of the double’s dynamism with Goliadkin’s inertia, the double seemingly free of self-consciousness and Goliadkin ever-more paralysed by it.
The physicality of this juxtaposition first becomes clear when Goliadkin tries to confront his double for stealing his papers at work. The double humiliates Goliadkin as he “tickles him, seizes his rather plump right cheek with two fingers, tickles him a couple times more” (83) and then “flicks him on the taut little paunch” (83). Where such rapid listing was once used by the narrator to depict Goliadkin’s mounting physical or linguistic failures, this rapid listing of verbs represents depicts the double’s mounting multi-pronged attack, the various humiliations that he successfully inflicts on Goliadkin, who stands there “motionless and mad with rage”, “unable to recover,” (83)—as though his extreme anxiety has rendered him unable to speak or act.
This dichotomy between dynamism and self-paralysis is also represented as a linguistic process — through the double’s verbal prowess. Goliadkin, when trying to address people in positions of power, finds himself at a loss of words, stumbling over broken syntax, repeating the listener’s name and rushing into run-on sentences: “Andrei Filipovich, I am alluding Andrei Filipovich, to a certain person..I am within, my rights, Andrei Filipovich, that the authorities should encourage such initiative.” (111) Yet, the double seems to find easy success in wheedling and currying favour, using his “lightness of tongue” (121) and mastery of speech for personal advantage. Goliadkin describes him as “a prankster, a leaper, a smoocher, a tittler” (121), with the listing of these asyndetic phrases representing the various linguistic avatars he jumps between so adroitly.
Nonetheless, their contrast, and the double’s linguistic mastery, is perhaps best emblematized by the double’s adoption of whispers as a motif. Goliadkin Jr is continually described as a swindler, running from one person to the next, whispering clandestine nothings in his exercise of soft power. Here, whispers become metonyms for exclusive secrets, newly-formed bonds of closeness that Goliadkin is excluded from—further exacerbating his fears about the security of his own professional position. While whispers now represent the double’s success in cultivating personal relationships, they once represented Goliadkin’s failure of speech at Klara’s ball and Krestyan’s office—another piece of evidence that the double’s success are Goliadkin’s failures.
By the end of the novel, there is a fundamental tension between Goliadkin’s impression that he was the target of some conspiratorial persecution, and the alternate possibility that his eventual defeat, and his exile to a mental institution, are natural consequences of his self-consciousness. After all, as he is about to be carted away in the novel’s final moments, it is Goliadkin who “shrieked and clutched at his head. Alas! That was what he had known for a long time would happen” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 239). Bakhtin cites as the ultimate evidence that, in Dostoevsky’s novels, it is the consciousness and discourse of the hero, not the author, that reigns semantically supreme. In other words, Goliadkin’s final shriek only reaffirms the notion that in inventing criticisms that he needed to evade, in imagining the flaws others saw in him that he needed to challenge, it is Goliadkin who brings these to life in an act of ultimate irony. Moreover, not only was it Goliadkin’s self-consciousnesses that seemed to engender the appearance of his double, but his double’s lack thereof—his shrewd dynamism unfettered by anxious thought—that enabled his total victory over his original. And yet the questions remain, what made Goliadkin so self-conscious in the first place? Was it the claustrophobia of his social position? Did he acquire the neuroses of the city of St. Petersburg? Where does the devil lie? The novel never answers these questions, nor even confirms the possibility of life outside Goliadkin’s mind, choosing to focus instead on the notion of self-consciousness: consciousness turning inward and devastating itself in the process. It remains up to the reader to keep wondering whether it was all just a phantom of his mind, in fact, whether there can ever be a life outside the mind, or to give up on such self-conscious thought altogether, lest they find themselves vanquished and replaced by their own double soon after.
Bibliography
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Double and The Gambler. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Classics, 2007.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.