THE IMPOSSIBLE NARRATOR

Abstract

The article concerns the so-called objective, third-person narration in Dostoevsky’s novel The Doppelganger, a matter deemed unquestionable by literary science and thought to be the most demanding of tasks overcome by the writer when composing a novel about the ‘split personality’ phenomenon. By means of studying nuances of the narrative voice – which is to say, disrupting the objectivity and functionality of the act – we demonstrate that the focus is not on authoritative position in the narration, which significantly diversifies the former attitude on the value of The Doppelganger, as well as its identification merely with the psychological study of the case. The understanding of the relationship between the protagonist and narrator is of utmost importance for the complete significance and meaning of The Doppelganger, which was, in accordance with his theory on polyphony in Dostoevsky’s work, primarily indicated by M. Bachtin, accentuating the intrusion of the narrator’s voice into the protagonist’s awareness. However, that hardly concludes the elaboration of the complex relationship between the narrator and protagonist, so in denoting the changes in the narrator’s attitude towards the protagonist, we also unveil a reverse process which Bachtin has not mentioned: the intrusion of the protagonist’s awareness into narration, a process which has only been developed in the modern novel. Even though Dostoevsky’s ”doppelganger” represents a heroic figure, the impossible narrator of the novel (its impossibility stemming from the simultaneous usage of omniscience and dramatized voice, and by identification with the main protagonist’s perspective, the focalization gradually transferring from zero value to variable, while the distance in regard to the protagonist continually shifts) is a distant ancestor of the ”doppelganger” as the author figure, a phenomenon only to be developed in the 20th century.