The young man, whose story is to be told, also emerges from his obsessions. His questioning and indecision force the reader into another radical sense of the novel. He tallies his accounts and checks his provisions. All of his choices for the story are made and remade. The narrator obsesses over making his narrative to the point of not making it. The first deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book itself the second, the story the narrator intends to tell, presents a young man's arrival in America. These stories are simultaneous and not chronological. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. The words move, cluster, jostle, and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies, and imitations. Federman gives each of these pages a shape or structure, most often a diagram or picture. Double or Nothing is a concrete novel in which the words become physical materials on the page.
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