In Search of the "Other" into the Night: A Study of the Double in a Polyphonic Perspective

Abstract

From the perspective of psychology, the individual becomes conscious of or rethinks about themselves in the relationship with their double, represented artistically through conflicts that constitute the human psyche. From the perspective of the philosophy of language, especially the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, the double consists of the fear of others, that is, the image others make of the subject. Whichever the perspective adopted is, the literary work, as it represents the man and his world, provides an effective means of understanding the subject’s conflicts and existential and identity crises evidenced in the discourses registered in the aesthetic object. This paper intends to analyze how duplicity-understood here as multiplied consciousness-takes place among characters in the narrative of Night, by the Brazilian author Erico Verissimo, in which the duplicated individual is the sign of a fragmented self. The aim is to examine which enunciative-discursive positions the protagonist assumes in the narrative to emphasize the duplicity of the subject from a polyphonic perspective; that is, by the biases of philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis and philosophy of language. As theoretical support for the examination of the double, we invite authors who navigate through philosophy, such as Clément Rosset; psychology and psychoanalysis, such as Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and C. F. Keppler; and, in the field of philosophy of language, Mikhail M. Bakhtin. Although the theorists adopt different views in re-examining the double, the approach is possible given that most admit certain correlations regarding the subject of otherness.