Word: doppelg
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...play's two principal figures have a Doppelgänger relationship. Each is the split image of the other. Since the exercise of power and authority is one of the few remotely coherent themes, the two men may represent the eerie bond between Germany and Hitler. Otherwise, the evening is one interminable non sequitur...
...these are all enigmas. Nor is the situation made clearer by the intimation that one of Stephen's contemporaries, a freelance careerist of the emotions called Charlie, is the hero's Doppelgänger. It is even suggested that the story is Charlie's not Stephen's; thus, although written throughout in the first person, it should actually be in the second. If so, the moral of the story seems to be that a man cannot be trusted to write his own history, and that even his best friend will have trouble with his obituary...
...intelligence. Powerful images, emotions "like great knotted snakes" overwhelmed him. Sometimes in his seizures he could not distinguish between past and present. Once, while walking through the woods, he saw a figure walking toward him, and as it passed he realized in terror that the figure was himself, his Doppelgänger...
...Russian Doppelgänger. At one point in the story, an official jeers at an idealist: "You reformers! I suppose you'd like to see a kindly socialism, a free form of slavery . . .?" That is the vision that addles the heads of the two principal characters in the subplot-the student Seryozha and his girl Katya. Seryozha dreams of "a new world Communist and radiant" in which "top wages would be paid to cleaning women. Cabinet ministers would be kept on short rations to make sure of their disinterested motives. Money, torture and thievery would be abolished." Alas...
...potential murders, apparent suicides, strangely worded wills. For a romantic setting there is the 17th century chateau of St. Gilles, not unlike Daphne Du Maurier's own sprawling, 70-room Menabilly House on the Cornish coast, great and gloomy original for Rebecca's legendary Manderley. No reasonable Doppelgänger could wish for an eerier home-away-from-home...