The doppelgäenger as a Theme and Technique in Ricardo Piglia’s Narrative

Abstract

This article addresses the presence of the figure of the doppelgäenger or the double as a theme and technique in Ricardo Piglia’s narrative. After making an account of the poetic techniques and perspectives of the Argentinian writer, based on multiple studies of his work, a type of reading is proposed founded on the double that would come to suggest an internal correlation between his novelistic work and the publication of Los diarios de Emilio Renzi. To make a better explanation of the above, some aspects of the figure of the double are retaken within the literary tradition and modern thought, from the perspective of the German romantics, through psychoanalysis, until reaching the formal and structural theories of the literature. In this way, it is suggested that by evoking passages from his novels in the narrated world of Los diarios… an effect of estrangement (ostranenie) is generated, which is key to the narrator’s critical and aesthetic works.