THE DOPPELGANGER MOTIF IN TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED: A STUDY

Abstract

The concept of doppelganger in literary texts is associated mostly with the ready provision for an apparition of a living person. This German word which literally means ‘double-goer’ is brought into language and simultaneously into the literary tradition as a term first used by the novelist Joann Paul Fredrich Richter in a footnote to his novel Siebenkiis (1796). German Romanticism has meditated the development of it in the romantic writers’ struggle to reach beyond the already structured platforms for an existence and its limited possibilities, by asserting a simulacrum of characters with slippage of identity and fragmentation of self and exteriorization of an alter ego. Doppelgangers are physical projections that epitomizes the otherwise hidden, secret or unconscious self of a person. They are mostly introduced in settings that are dark and spooky immediately suggesting the horrific nature associated with doubles and it usually happens to the men of solitude and isolation. The ‘double’ is not completely identical to the original one and their differences is responsible for the dynamic tension that always exits between them.