SOURCE: "Singles and Doubles: Peter Schlemil" in The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis, University of California Press, 1976, pp. 138-55.

In the following essay, Massey begins by comparing Peter Schlemihl and Frankenstein, and continues by discussing the ways in which polarities and oppositional schemes operate in Chamisso's novel.

Peter Schlemihl is a book that shows nemerous situational similarities to Frankenstein. Both books are tragedies of science; both involve doubles (in fact, Peter Schlemihl himself has at least two doubles—his shadow and the devil); both raise the question of what happens, or what should happen, when the intellectual force is detached from its embodiment. But the answers the two books produce are quite different, even though the materials they manipulate are similar, even to such details as the ice fields that furnish the setting for the crucial scenes. Both books create an individual who is unnatural, who is outside...