Tara's Reviews > The Double

“Numb and chill with horror, our hero woke up, and numb and chill with horror felt that his waking state was hardly more cheerful...It was oppressive and harrowing...He was overcome by such anguish that it seemed as though someone were gnawing at his heart.”

The Double is a vivid, relentless depiction of one man’s downward spiral into the impulsivity, indecision, tormenting confusion and ultimate chaos of severe mental illness. Golyadkin’s agonizing descent, fueled by alienation, paranoia and self-loathing, is incredibly gripping. Deftly plotted, harrowing, insidious, and heartbreaking, this supposedly “minor work” of Doestoevsky’s is anything but.

This nuanced, meticulous character study is dark and disturbing, the unbearably harsh inner landscape relieved only rarely by faint glimmers of humor. Dostoevsky, the master psychologist, so perfectly delineates the complexities of a mind that’s rapidly unraveling, consuming itself in front of the readers’ very eyes, that, though horrifying, it’s nearly impossible to look away. Golyadkin frantically bounces back and forth between one extreme and another, and at times this bizarre, erratic behavior would almost be comical if it weren’t for the fact that it’s so horribly sad. Trivial incidents are hideously magnified or minimized, distorted beyond all recognition, lost. Increasingly, he can “not think of anything, though his thoughts catch at everything like brambles.” His mind finally becomes so detached from itself that it splits, torn and fragmented, utterly disconnected, yet still bleating in distress.

What made this often extremely dismal tale so poignant and touching was Dostoevsky’s palpable compassion for his wretched character; it illuminates a miserable fellow human being deserving of our sympathy and understanding. For while, at least on the surface, Golyadkin may not be Dostoevsky’s most relatable creation, he certainly broke my heart. I’ll always remember him struggling desperately to come to grips with his own mind, to reassure himself that everything would be okay even when his progressively feverish grasping for sanity secured nothing more substantial than mocking emptiness and thin air. His plight, his undeniable suffering, etched itself on my heart. I won’t soon forget that piercing, plaintive scream, a mind in unendurable pain, crying out for help, for any kind of respite or relief from its own worst enemy: itself.