SOURCE: “Dostoevsky's Dvoinik per Lacan's Parole,” in The Affirming Flame: Religion, Language, Literature, University of Oklahoma Press, 1988, pp. 58–73.

In the following essay, Patterson attempts to apply Lacan's concept of “parole” to The Double.

Having examined the implications of Lacan's parole for the literary critic, let us consider its implications for the critical approach to a specific literary text. As such an investigation, this [essay] provides an example of a response to a literary work in which personal presence achieved through the Word is an issue in the work itself. The [essay] demonstrates that Lacan's concept of the Word is applicable not only to the literary critic but to the literary character and the relationships that define him. For this purpose I have selected Dostoevsky's Dvoinik, or The Double (1846),¹ a novel in which the difficulty confronting the main character is fundamentally the same as the difficulty confronting the critic...