Despair invents an act of demented disassociation with which the audience cannot itself become complicitly engaged because the narrative mode is not expressionistic. Instead, it is overlaid by self-reflexive irony upon irony. The book is written as a memoir-diary: "the lowest form of literature," its author says. Rereading, the writer discovers his fatal mistake in commission of the perfect crime.

Nabokov's plot intact, [Tom] Stoppard and Fassbinder have enlarged the döppelgänger motif (including plays on old movie scenes), politicized time and place, and exteriorized Hermann's aberrations by means of fantasized, conjectural intrusions.

Doubling, of course, here advances double narrative functions: the visual evidence of Hermann's disassociation during his lovemaking, shared by ourselves through either party's eyes, and the satirized Felix-double, authenticated by the protagonist alone. As a self-conscious design it is foregrounded during an episode when Ardalion, Lydia and Hermann attend a movie, a made-up American...