THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

2.1 The North American Double The Avatar in Panamaconceptions, wild fantasias” (237), “disordered fancy” (239),“inexplicable vagaries of madness” (241), “species of mad hilarity in hiseyes – an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour” (242),a “sensitive nervousness” (244), and “a morbid acuteness of thesenses” (235). In Usher’s case, this hypersensitivity renders most musicintolerable but magnifies all other sounds which the narrator hearsregularly. This last trait in particular is found in many protagonists inliterature of the double. 12The “House of Usher” highlights other Gothic features as itportrays doubling in inanimate structures and literary forms. Thenarrator first witnesses the mansion as a reflection -“reduplication in thestill waters of the tarn” (239). This mirror image doubles and inverts thehouse which has also become a reflection of their ancestry. Theappellation “House of Usher” also has a double meaning as it confusesthe family with the mansion and so comes to represent them both (232).The literary doubling worked into the tale is revealed by means of abook reading: 13At the termination of this sentence I started and,for a moment, paused; for it appeared to me […]that, from some very remote portion of themansion, there came, indistinctly to my ears,what might have been, in its exact similarity ofcharacter, the echo […] of the very cracking andripping sound which Sir Launcelot had soparticularly described (243).Reality audibly mirrors fiction as the noises described in the textread aloud by the narrator are reiterated in the sounds both men hear inthe house; fiction and the real merge. This type of narrative device ismirrored in the metafictional techniques used a century later, atechnique particularly employed in Julio Cortázar’s “Continuidad de losparques”, and Jaramillo Levi’s “El lector”. 14A darkened lone house issuing “a wild light” is depicted at theend of the tale before it falls (245). This recalls the eeriness of a scenein Jaramillo Levi’s “Es él”:Una débil luz arrancó en ese momento reflejospálidos a la grama…alzamos la vista, y alinstante comprobamos atónitos que alguien12See Appendix C Amplificación13See Appendix C Book readings.14 For an analysis of “Continuidad de los parques” and “El lector”, see Second Nature:Julio Cortázar, 114.78