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4 Doubling Death: Seeking the Immortal Self in Stories from Can Such Things Be? All creatures born by our fantasy, in the last analysis, are nothing but ourselves. —Friedrich Schiller ot only in “The Damned Thing,” but also in “Visions of the Night,” “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” and many other writings, Bierce uses a double motif to represent the fear of death associated with identity crisis. Dating back to classical mythology and drama, the literary construct of the double or doppelgänger (literally “double-goer” in German) has acquired archetype status throughtime.Asaresult,themotifcandescendintostereotypeandparodywhen used or interpreted superficially. However, an understanding of the psychological underpinnings of the double—in connection with the personal, social, and literary contexts that influenced Bierce—supports the view that he used the device both consciously and unconsciously to project not only his own but also his readers’ ambivalent feelings about the human mind and death. Thus, in reading his doubles from a psychoanalytic perspective, we learn not only about Bierce but about ourselves as well. The term doppelgänger originated with the German writer Jean Paul Richter, who applied it to his 1796 novel Siebenkäs. Unsurprisingly, the subsequent romantic movements in Germany, England, and the United States, with their interest in exploring the individual self, the psyche of the artist, and the duality of nature , resulted in the creation of an abundance of gothic literature that employed the doppelgänger device. Although use of the literary double peaked in the first half of the nineteenth century, the figure still populates literature and film to the present day. The continued presence of the figure as a symbol of the divided nature of the human mind supports the argument of Carl Jung that the modern Doubling Death 44 human’s main goal is individuation—to become whole or integrated as a personality .1 Clearly, however, the problem of self-knowledge and the associated human search for mental and spiritual wholeness transcends time, as the entire history of philosophy, religion, and literature testifies. Early human concern with fragmentation and division links to ideas about duplication and doubling, most obviously in the anthropological documentation of beliefs that twins are “magical, reflections awesome, shadows tabued, dreams portentous and, most significant of all, that the soul itself is portable” (Hallam 6). In his landmark comparative study of folklore, magic, and religion, anthropologist Sir James George Frazer observes, “If a man moves or lives, it can only be because he has a little man or animal inside who moves him. The animal inside the animal, the man inside the man, is the soul. . . . Hence if death be the permanent absence of the soul, the way to safeguard against it is either to prevent the soul from leaving the body, or, if it does depart, to ensure that it shall return” (207). The concept of the double thus results when the inner being escapes to exist separately from its “host” being, causing the untenable separation of body and soul, conscious and unconscious. As a result, the figure is fraught with ambivalent notions of good and evil, sacred and profane, mortality and immortality. While the data of anthropology and folklore verified the universality and power of the double, our understanding of the phenomenon has been informed by psychoanalytic theory. Drawing from Freud’s breakthrough in understanding the divided nature of the human personality and applying those ideas to anthropological evidence, Otto Rank pioneered an understanding of the associated psychoanalytic and literary implications in his study entitled The Double, and he subsequently extended these ideas as part of Beyond Psychology, which was first published two years after his death. Rank explains the double as an extension of the ancestral and universal belief in the immortal self, a belief that evolved from “the ancient belief in the soul, as derived from a naïve association between the duplication of the body in the shadow and the corresponding mythic attitude towards the sun” (Hallam 14). Although the inherent duality in the subject itself permits its literary “treatment in different forms, varying from the naïve comedy of errors enacted between identical twins to the tragic, almost pathological loss of one’s real self through a superimposed one,” Rank observes that the symbolism remains constant: “namely, the presentation of the second self by one’s own shadow or reflection” (Beyond Psychology 70). Within this concept, he “sees the root of man’s two endeavors to preserve his self and to maintain the belief in its immorality...

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