SOURCE: "Border Doubles: Twin Poles of the Canadian Psyche," in The Borders of Nightmare: The Fiction of John Richardson, University of Toronto Press, 1992, pp. 69-109.

In the following excerpt, Hurley discusses family relationships and the doppelgänger theme in Wacousta.

In Canada, the wilderness, symbolized by the north, creates a kind of doppelganger figure who is oneself and yet the opposite of oneself . . . The Canadian recurring themes of self-conflict, of the violating of nature, of individuals uncertain of their social context, of dark, repressed oracular doubles concealed within each of us, are now more communicable outside Canada in the new mood of the world.

NORTHROP FRYE, Divisions on a Ground

His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE, In the Skin of a Lion

'Break boundaries'—points of reversal generating a paradoxical blurring...