"Fritz" and Satyajit Ray's Exploration of the Supernatural Anonymous 11th Grade

Satyajit Ray’s overwhelming influence in world cinema as a filmmaker continues unabated; but he was also an accomplished short story writer, and it is interesting to see that a small but rewarding portion of his corpus concerns the macabre or the supernatural. In “Fritz” Ray exploits the tension between the everyday and the paranormal to create a masterly tale, almost Gothic in texture, about a man’s obsession with an accursed childhood doll.

Jayanto, an editorial executive at a newspaper, visited Bundi on an archaeological trip undertaken by his father when he was six; ever since, the place exerts a magnetic pull on his imagination. On a trip with his friend, the narrator Shankar, memories of a childhood doll, Fritz, begin to resurface. Fritz was a Swiss doll gifted to Jayanto by an uncle; “an old man, dressed in traditional Swiss style. Apparently it was very lifelike.” The doll was mauled by two dogs during Jayanto’s stay in Bundi, and Jayanto gave it a proper funeral at the foot of a deodar tree in the circuit-house compound.

In The Uncanny, Freud says that children are unwilling to tell apart the living from the lifeless. Donald Winnicott further expanded on this to come up with the idea of the “transitional object”—a toy...