Dostoevsky’s The Double puts the reader in the shoes of a marginalized underdog who may or may not be going mad: Mr. Golyadkin, outfoxed and ousted by his apparently shameless double, slides into a state of delusional contradictions and/or persecution--and, thanks to the narrator’s rhetorical strategies, so does the reader.
In Dostoevsky’s early novel The Double (1848), uncanny tricks are played not just on the protagonist, the cowed underdog Mr Golyadkin, but also on the reader. Golyadkin, gradually outfoxed and ousted by his shameless double, experiences a gradual dissolution of his world and an inexorable slide into an ambiguous state of delusion and/or real persecution; but the reader too, owing to rhetorical tricks played by Dostoevsky’s narrator, is drawn into a semi-delusional world full of doubts, ambiguities and outright impossible contradictions. By subtle degrees, we readers come to experience, from inside, the same world as the hapless protagonist as he is taken away to the lunatic asylum—make of that what we will.