The Paradox of the Boyg: A Study of Peer Gynt's Humanization

The Paradox of the Boyg: A Study of Peer Gynt's Humanization ENSAF THUNE • THE NEED TO COME TO TERMS with one's identity, to explore the many guises of self, to relocate the center of existence and to understand one's place in society are all recurring themes in literature growing out of, and expressing, shifts and transitions in the soul of an epoch. Such themes in fiction are frequently conveyed through varied patterns of the "second self' figure, a self who is both subjectively and objectively related to the protagonist. The second self is described by one critic as "the strange creature who in being second necessarily partakes of being first, who in his oppositeness to his counterpart is always the same, who walks without yet is rooted within: the ancient paradox of the self beside the self."l Unlike the doppelganger, popular with the writers of the Germanic Romantic Movement, the second self suggests a psychological or inner continuum , without the concomitant of duplication inherent in the theme of the double. It provides a freer and more subtle metaphor for the working out of the enigma ofpersonality, because its relationship with the protagonist is more often suggested through contrast and difference than through resemblance and similarity. The linkage between protagonist and second self in dramatic literature , which lacks the advantages of the expansive form of fiction, is generally expressed through innuendos in action, character development, and idea. Sometimes, however, the more obvious forms of an inwardoutward relationship between the characters are also used, e.g., the stranger, or intruder, who appears at a psychologically opportune moment in the life of the protagonist, of which the blind Negro in Pinter's 89 90 ENSAFTHUNE The Room is a prime example. The Old Man in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus belongs in this category, and Ibsen's plays are full of strange visitants on the periphery of action, who are yet integral parts of the main conflict: the rat wife in Little Eyolj, the elf-like Gerd in Brand, and the stranger from Finnmark in Ladyfrom The Sea, to name only a few. More often, however, particularly in modern and contemporary drama, significant treatments of the linkage of protagonist and second self replace the heavy-handed and obvious intruder figure by a synthesis of subtle intimations in text and subtext, rendered through imagery as well as through such presentational aspects as juxtaposition, sequence of events, silence, gesture, properties and choreography. Second self in literature deals in broad terms with problems of identity and self-realization. Despite differences of approaches, psychological , sociological or literary in the interpretation of the second self, most theories seem to agree that he represents the effort of an individual, or symbolically of an epoch, to reconcile and integrate sharply divided basic tensions in individual or communal consciousness.2 The price for the development of civilized man has been the dislocation of identity. The literature of the second self is concerned, directly or indirectly, with an examination of the process of fragmentation, on the individual, as well as on the social, level. Frequently such an examination leads, consciously or otherwise, to the rediscovery of a sense of destiny, ofa unified image ofhumanity that transcends a narrow sterile individuality. The second self story is thus a story ofgrowth, and to that extent it is a bildungsroman. It involves progression toward awareness and knowledge , as the protagonist is compelled by circumstance to face the question of who he is, and of the way in which his private self, hidden from the eyes of the world, is related to his outward self. The significance of the second self in literature, as C.E. Keppler points out, is to show that the recovery of individual and communal identity is not the work of chance or even cause, but of necessity and inevitability. An individual realizes himself, or discovers the meaning of his existence at the point when his will becomes part of a larger grander will. "The second self, we are always made to feel, not only does create, but in the worlds of the Lord must create, and not haphazardly but in just that way, in just that context, and...