The Double's Creation as a Necessary Anti-Hero

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“In literature the double is a result of the author's conscious or unconscious desire for a wider range of action, possibilities of behavior for his hero that go beyond the morally acceptable, and this wish will create itself in the form of a double, or anti-hero” writes Joyce Carol Oates in her piece “Tragic and Comic Visions in The Brothers Karamazov.” Just as Oates suggests that doubles are created in order for an author to extend a character's range of believable actions, doubles exist to bring about change in their original forms. Citing Mikhail Bakhtin's criticism of Dostoyevsky's creation technique, I intend to align the author's intentions with the intentions of his characters, and explain that due to the author's need for a wider range of motion within a character, the character themselves creates a double. Through an understanding of this, one can view my theory through a psychological viewpoint of the original, non-duplicated, character. I also aim to present the idea of the double as an authorial tool. The latter viewpoint intends to examine doubles through in purely literal light.

A psychological viewpoint is appropriate to my research paper for the fact that each of the prime instances of doubling I aim to discuss occur unconsciously. The intentions of the originals, in my case Jack from Fight Club and Ivan from The Brothers Karamazov, that lead to the creation of their doubles lie deep within their psyches and are unacknowledged by the character. I aim to explain what occurs inside the depths of a character's mind leading up to the situation in which a double is inadvertently created. In relation to my novel and character selection I intend to discuss dissociative fugue (a result of dissociative identity ...

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