ABSTRACT
History features prominently in the corpus of Leonardo Sciascia's writings. The polaric nature of Sciascia's relationship with history is manifest in the presentation of conflicting philosophies of history and in the narrative construction of Il Consiglio d'Egitto. The dualistic construction of the novel is replicated in the antithetical figures of Di Blasi and Velia — both figures from Sicilian history whose lives and circumstances are well documented — and their respective approaches to history in the reality of eighteenth-century Sicily. Sciascia's dualistic appreciation of history demands that Vella's selfish, deceitful activities and his sceptical view of history as fiction or fraud, be countered by Di Blasi's reverence for historical truth and his altruistic, idealistic search for a better world. Sciascia's use of the double is uniquely personal, for it incorporates a process whereby the doubled characters undergo an exchange of situations which he himself terms reversibilita, and which he had already expounded in his detective fiction.
