The Double: Why Its Narrator Sounds Like Golyadkin
Part of: The Deep Reader
Spoiler note: This essay discusses The Double in full, including its ending.
Golyadkin insists that he is not a rag. A few sentences later, the narration is considering what sort of rag he might become, allowing him dignity and feelings even in that reduced condition.
The offended man is a clerk in Dostoevsky’s The Double, living in Petersburg and struggling to establish that he is respectable, independent and quite ordinary. A man with his face and name enters his life, joins his office and begins to outmaneuver him. The narrator labels the original Golyadkin senior and the newcomer Golyadkin junior. The first wants the world to acknowledge which of them deserves its respect.
We might look to the third-person narrator for help. He can follow the clerk home, report what he thinks and show us the embarrassments he would prefer to conceal. Yet the voice conducting us through these scenes keeps taking up Golyadkin’s excuses. Even a sentence that begins by affirming his resolve may end by bargaining it away.
What the rag is allowed to keep
In Chapter VIII, Golyadkin junior turns a confrontation with the original into a public amusement, pinching and patting his cheek in front of the watching clerks. Golyadkin senior is furious at the humiliation.
At first, Golyadkin imagines how generously he might have behaved had the last insult never happened. Perhaps he would have restrained his anger, submitted, disputed a little, yielded a little, yielded further. If the other man admitted he was right, perhaps a warmer friendship could arise. In Garnett’s English, the accumulating qualifications carry him from tolerating the offense to imagining a relationship that might eclipse it altogether. What began as a declaration of the limit to his patience becomes a rehearsal of reconciliation.
Then his quoted thought restores the firmness:
“I am not a rag. I am not a rag, sir!”
The narrator takes over, reporting a decision to protest to the last. Golyadkin cannot consent to such treatment. The determination acquires an emphatic little endorsement: that is the sort of man he is. Then comes:
“No quarrelling, however, no quarrelling!”
The passage continues by considering whether someone who really insisted might turn him into a rag after all. Golyadkin might offer no resistance. The objection now concerns the qualities the rag would retain: it would possess dignity, feelings and sentiments, even if those feelings lay hidden in its filthy folds.
Follow the concessions and the comedy becomes almost physically uncomfortable. Each new clause makes the abasement easier to imagine while reserving a smaller portion of self-respect. Golyadkin’s pride is still protesting after the imagined circumstances have conceded everything it originally opposed. We can hear how badly he wants to avoid the quarrel without accepting the description of himself that avoidance might imply.
Some of these words are presented as his thoughts, others as the narrator’s explanation. Passing between them, the prose keeps the same anxious negotiation going. The narrator knows enough to make the retreat ridiculous; he also grants it the time and elaboration Golyadkin needs to make it tolerable.
The chronicler at the ball
Earlier, in Chapter IV, the narrator introduces a birthday celebration for Klara Olsufyevna, daughter of the official who has been Golyadkin’s patron. He repeatedly professes his inability to describe such magnificence, invoking Homer and Pushkin as talents adequate to the task. His disclaimers swell into an extravagant description of the dinner and dance.
Rank supplies the comparisons. A young register clerk, moved by the speeches, looks more like a civil councillor; another official seems too exalted to belong to his actual grade. Moral worth, administrative advancement and polite emotion are allowed to confirm one another. The language is lavishly funny, particularly when the narrator declares himself silent after having told us so much.
This performance prepares the position from which Golyadkin will be seen. The other guests receive verbal promotions before the intruder’s appearance; their mutual admiration makes him seem excluded before he steps into the room. Turning back to the clerk, the narrator calls him the “true and only hero of my very truthful tale.” The claim accompanies a man concealed behind a cupboard and a screen among discarded household things.
There, Golyadkin is supposedly all right. He could go in whenever he wanted; for the moment, he is merely watching. The narration entertains these reassurances while supplying their embarrassing conditions: he has been waiting for hours, cold and afraid to enter. When hesitation threatens his account of himself, the explanation is adjusted. He stays hidden because he prefers to stay hidden.
His chosen words and the scene’s material facts rub against each other. The cupboard, screen and rubbish prevent the reassuring description from persuading us completely. But the description still takes possession of the telling, prolonging the interval in which he can regard his exclusion as a choice. We share his delay even while seeing through it.
Once he enters, the prose gives us a hurried succession of collisions, a torn dress and a failed greeting. Golyadkin notices none of the damage on his way toward Klara. Here the narrator plainly sees more than his character. That capacity makes the later borrowing of his excuses stranger: a voice capable of showing us what he misses nevertheless slips back into his effort to appear composed.
The same anxious address we hear in Dostoevsky’s spoken exchanges has spread into the sentences that tell us what happened. The clerk no longer has to be speaking for his need to justify himself to govern the pace.
The assurance before the name
On the stormy walk after his expulsion from the party, Golyadkin encounters the man who will become his rival. The narrator lingers over familiarity before permitting identification. This is an ordinary man, a gentleman like other gentlemen; Golyadkin knows him, knows his name, yet would refuse to say it. We follow the repeated encounters through streets and up the staircase before the stranger is disclosed as his double.
The delay makes a withheld name more disturbing than a promptly announced marvel. The account moves from a sense of familiarity to the insistence that Golyadkin knows the man perfectly, even as it withholds the name he cannot bear to say. Although the narrator could name the stranger at once, he prolongs Golyadkin’s resistance before supplying the answer.
Later, when the double multiplies in Golyadkin’s dream, the narration becomes emphatic about Golyadkin senior’s innocence. The rival is false, worthless and depraved; the persecuted original is repeatedly certified as genuine and deserving of compassion. These judgments accompany a nightmare in which everyone prefers the rival. Their insistence belongs to the struggle being represented: Golyadkin needs his goodness affirmed as the dream deprives him of recognition.
The dream is explicitly marked as a dream. Its multiplication of bodies should not be used to settle what happens in the waking scenes. What travels across that boundary is the habit of justification, the stream of favorable and hostile descriptions through which the original tries to hold his position. The telling can provide a clear transition out of sleep and still remain involved in his struggle.
The last reassurance
At the final gathering in the same household, Golyadkin appears to receive the welcome he has wanted. He reads sympathy in the host’s face and tears in the eyes of the surrounding guests. The narrator lets the reconciliation spread from person to person, then qualifies it: perhaps Golyadkin has imagined their tears because he is crying himself.
We are given time to inhabit the welcome before its basis becomes uncertain. His feelings have supplied an interpretation of other people’s faces; the narration has carried that interpretation far enough for us to feel the relief of it. Suspicion returns as the guests continue to watch, whisper and arrange his movements. An apparent restoration to the company becomes a preparation for his departure with the doctor.
Golyadkin’s tears are real within the account even where the tears he sees in others may be his fancy. Earlier in the chapter, the waiting cabman seems to pity him and agrees to wait. We can attend to that possibility without assuming the clerk has correctly read the whole company’s intentions.
The gathering’s reassurance sounds familiar. As Golyadkin is led away, people tell him that everything is all right and identify the doctor as his old acquaintance. The words that helped him sustain himself in hiding now accompany his removal. Their effect depends on the discrepancy between the comfort they offer and the movement of his body toward the carriage.
Inside the carriage, Golyadkin sees a terrible stranger in the doctor he knows. A final diagnosis cannot simply be read back into every sentence we have followed. The departure is happening; the familiar man’s transformation belongs to Golyadkin’s terror. Dostoevsky holds these together as the clerk tries once more to soften the person beside him by saying that he is all right. The plea has become smaller and more submissive, addressed to someone who now determines where he will go.
Comments