The Phenomenalist

The Phenomenalist is a work of metafiction in the avant-garde style of David Markson (Wittgenstein's Mistress), Jesse Ball (The Way Through Doors), Paul Auster (City of Glass), and others. And thematically, this book is much akin to Dostoyevsky's (The Double), Nabokov's (Despair), and Sarama[o's (The Double), with liberal doses of absurdism added for color. The central character, Karl, discovers through a series of encounters with body doubles, that true doubles share not only identical bodies, but also share a single consciousness as well. The story's unnamed narrator, who can read Karl's mind, but never reveals himself, secretly follows Karl and documents his movements and internal conflicts. Karl's discovery of doppelgangers leads him to question conventional notions of identity and continuity of self