Recurring appearances of Wokulski’s doppelgängers, or mental projections in the form of voices and visions, manifest his repressed desires, while the novel’s numerous quasi-doubles-characters bearing an uncanny resemblance-serve as a key organizing principle of the narrative, providing the protagonist with positive and negative insight into himself. While critics have increasingly characterized The Doll as a proto-modernist, dialogic novel, what has received relatively little attention among scholars of this novel is the pervasive use of the literary double as a device for exploring Wokulski’s profound ambivalence-and by extension that of the transitional generation that he represents. These notions, traditionally associated respectively with the Polish Romantic and Positivist movements, are articulated and championed in the novel by various characters, and indeed compete with one another within the conflicted psyches of individual characters. Critics have devoted much attention to the complex ideological discourse of Bolesław Prus’s The Doll, justly noting that throughout the novel its protagonist, Stanisław Wokulski, is torn between impulses to romance, political revolt, science, business, and social progress.
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