The Double: Dostoevsk’s Doppelgänger approach

Imagine someone trying to steal your life. What would you do?

Mr. Golyadkin is a civil servant in the 9th ranking with psychological problems. A hero was created to represent defeat. A polite and pitiful one. Paranoid, suspicious to all. A weak person who can never make a decision and always regrets them. A cowardly character who is constantly tormented by these feelings. Other people can appear to his eyes as angels in one moment and devils in a few seconds.
Being indecisive in every way, even in love. This is pain.
The sudden appearance of a similar. Uncertainties before it. People’s behavior towards him can be considered really strange. His arrest at the end of the work. Both the fake and genuine sadness that everyone pretends to push him away. To be upset with someone or to bury him alive?!

Our hero rested very poorly, that is, did not fall completely asleep even for five minutes: as if some joker had put cut-up bristles in his bed.

Dostoevsky represented discomforts very well. When you read you feel them

Although the author tries to make the second Golyadkin exactly like a separate real anti-hero, we do not know whether it is a nightmare of Golyadkin, who does not take his medicine. Perhaps this second Golyadkin came as a manifestation of other people’s hatred towards him and all the devilish evil deeds?!

If some stranger, some disinterested observer, had merely glanced from the side now at Mr. Goliadkin’s dreary course, even he would have been pervaded at once by all the terrible horror of his misfortunes and would surely have said that Mr. Goliadkin looked as if he wanted to hide somewhere from himself, as if he wanted to escape somewhere from himself.

What a portrayal

Finally, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin’s surname is taken from the Russian word for “голый” (phonetic pronunciation: goly), meaning bareness or nakedness. Feelings could be understood in a holistic way. When the Double comes, maybe it brings a real you, or the one always chasing in your unconscious mind.

Thanks for reading, and have a great week ahead!😊