Duality Is Their Reality

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Today is the first day of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, but it was also still autumn for a few hours. So, a two-faced day.

As in real life, some fictional characters also have two faces — offering different personas at different times and in different situations. This can be among the many building blocks involved in making a character complex, nuanced, and three-dimensional.

Perhaps the most literal depiction of a Janus-like character is the star of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The duality in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel happens when Jekyll, a basically good man with some repressed dark tendencies, takes a potion that turns him into the evil Hyde.

But things are usually somewhat more subtle when it comes to characters with binary tendencies.

For instance, the villainous Count Fosco can also be quite charming in Wilkie Collins’ 1860 classic The Woman in White.

Much more recently, we have Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, which reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the vantage point of escaped slave Jim — after Twain mostly focused on Huck in his 1884 book. The duality here is that James, in a recognizable self-preservation maneuver, speaks in a different way (intellectually) to his fellow Black people than to white people (with whom he plays dumb). James, which I read last week, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction earlier this year.

Jim’s dual persona reminds me of female characters who are smarter and/or more strategic than they let on. Daisy Buchanan of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) would be one example.

Returning to contemporary literature, we have Val McDermid’s crime series about cold-case detective Karen Pirie. She is mostly tough while on the job — both with suspects and with the people (including sexist men) she works with — while Pirie’s more vulnerable side emerges in her personal life.

Then there are the characters who are warrior-like in battle even as they can have more-tender aspects when not fighting. Jamie Fraser of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series certainly has those two elements.

Sometimes, two parts of a personality exist more consecutively than simultaneously — as with young Neville Longbottom of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. He starts off bumbling and insecure, but eventually becomes quite courageous. Perhaps that arc is more maturity than duality.

Any comments about and/or examples of this topic?

Misty the cat says: “It’s the first day of winter. Autumn must still be around here somewhere.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which has a dystopian novel theme as it discusses 19 school-district jobs saved and 84 not saved (evoking George Orwell’s 1984) — is here.

19 thoughts on “Duality Is Their Reality”

  1. I’m not long home from a weekend away, Dave, so I’ll have to sleep on this one. For the time being, however, I’ll give you Angelo, the hypocritical deputy in Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’, who sentences Isabella’s brother to death for pre-marital sex with his fiance and goes on to sexually harass Isabella. Or how about Iago, so-called loyal servant to Othello, while in fact plotting his master’s downfall? Thanks for yet another workout of the little grey cells! 🙂

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  2. I always thought that Hester Prynne had a bit of a split personality vibe going on.

    The other book that comes to mind is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where just about everybody has something else tucked away inside.

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    • Thank you, Dan! I agree about Hester Prynne — conventional yet unconventional, private but some outgoing tendencies, etc. — and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The latter novel of course illustrates that people with mental illness (or alleged mental illness) can definitely have some widely varied behaviors.

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  3. Dave, another great topic of conversation that gave me a great deal to think about. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the discussion unfolds. I’ve often thought that The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tells us a great deal about ourselves. It asks an unsettling question: how does evil arrive, and what happens when we pretend it isn’t part of the human makeup at all? The possibility of having two sides reaches back even further, to the figure of Janus — not as deceit, but as an emblem of thresholds and complexity.

    I also appreciate your point that sometimes what looks like duality is actually becoming. Growth can masquerade as two selves when it’s really one self finding courage over time. What stays with me is that the most compelling characters aren’t split cleanly into light and dark, strength and gentleness, but carry these elements in tension. Like winter and autumn sharing a single day, the overlap is where the truth lives. I think this quote sums it all up.

    “I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.” Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

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    • Thank you, Rebecca! I agree that “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is quite an unsettling/profound work on one level while kind of a page-turning pulp thriller on another level.

      “Growth can masquerade as two selves when it’s really one self finding courage over time” — perfectly said!

      As the great quote that ends your comment indicates, Robert Louis Stevenson sure knew how to write. 🙂

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  4. Some authors depict the dual personality and/or triad by creating a whole person such as the Brothers Karamazov or the Tinman, Lion, and Scarecrow in Oz. They are aspects of the self which could be incorporated yet are better separate e.g. Dorothy vs the witch. Often the duality is somewhat escapable in that manner rather than turning them into an obviously bad vs good individual such as above and as in Jekyl and Hyde. I mean who wants to deal with the dark side of a woodcutter. Yikes!. Characters are easier to work with I would think. Can’t get the Sesame Street Song out of my head: one of these things is not like the other. It makes a more intriguing and interesting read to have an individual with a Ripley or Raskolnikov type persona. Of course the evil one has to be sweet natured and handsome as Shakespeare would say “The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape”. So that may indeed be our only give away before everything goes south. Thanks Dave. Susi

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    • Thank you, Susi! Interesting angles on this topic! If I’m understanding you correctly, the brothers in “The Brothers Karamazov” or Dorothy’s companions in Oz could symbolize the various aspects of one multifaceted person but are separate characters.

      “…the dark side of a woodcutter” — yikes, and hilarious! 😂

      And, yes, there’s duality in a way (at least in the eyes of some appearance-conscious observers) when a good-looking person turns out to be an evil person. One of the main male characters in Liane Moriarty’s “Big Little Lies” comes to mind.

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    • Thank you, Becky! A coincidence that we both read/are reading “James” at around the same time. 🙂 Yes, that duality of speech was very striking; it has been years since I read “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” but I don’t think Twain got into that specific language duality much — though he certainly got into other, partly related kinds of duality in “The Prince and the Pauper” and “Pudd’nhead Wilson.”

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  6. Dave, thanks for bringing Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James to our attention. Though no other two-faced fictional characters come to mind, I would add that such skills of deception are essential for fictional spies, con-artists, serial killers, vampires, and superheroes.

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    • Thank you, Rosaliene! So true that deception skills are essential for all the categories of people you mentioned. Great observation(s)! Made me think of novels such as some Agatha Christie mysteries, Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books, Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight,” James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Spy,” etc.

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  7. As you write, duality can be among the many building blocks involved in making a character complex, nuanced, and three-dimensional. I agree. Almost all literary characters of some import are and perhaps must be marked by duality or ambiguity. I just moved house (a habit that I gratify every four or five years or so) and poring over my rearranged library I found that the greater challenge would be to mention a novel where the main character(s) are entirely free from duality. When looking at authors themselves, the most striking duality is perhaps found in those who succumbed to romantized ideas of fascism, such as (in alphabetical order) Céline, D’Annunzio, Hamsun, Wyndham Lewis (and there are many more). They were artists first and foremost, yet they allowed the innocence of their art (often pure by itself) to be marred by and become disdained as a result from their foolish flirtation with the most damning and despicable of all ideologies (any ideology being contemptible by definiton).

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    • Thank you, Dingenom! Excellent points! Yes, almost any really interesting fictional character has at least some duality — whether subtle or more overt.

      As for your take on authors who have flirted with fascism, I agree that there’s some duality — disconnect, too — when a person is creative (as writers are) while also wedded to an ideology that in a real sense stifles creativity and free-thinking. In a different creative realm, Nazi-era German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl comes to mind.

      Hope your move went well! Never an easy thing, even when the person wants to do it every few years.

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