Snake Eyes and the three other novels Oates has written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith can all be classified as thrillers. What distinguishes them from the thrillers of other novelists is their insistence on the idea of the double. Oates may be drawing on the work of Julian Jaynes, her colleague at Princeton, whose book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind argues that the human mind once consisted of two parts, the speaking part and the hearing part. The mind, in other words, evolved from a split or double brain, with one part having an authoritative, commanding function and the other part an obeying function. Jaynes suggests that the schizophrenic brain may still be divided this way and Oates writes enough passages in each of these thrillers to suggest that she is using this theory to develop her artistic portrayal of...