The Thirtieth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE THIRTIETH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … the Eve of Samhain … I reread the most influential and probably the all-time best horror short story about doppelgängers, “William Wilson” (1839), written by my favorite author, Edgar Allen Poe. Let’s go through it together. 

SUMMARY WITH COMMENTS:

The narrator calls himself “William Wilson,” but this is a pseudonym. He doesn’t want the present account to further increase the infamy attached to his real name. The name chosen by the narrator already indicates the presence of a doppelgänger. He is Will, son of Will. Two wills mirror one another between the given name and the surname, with one the progenitor of the other. 

The narrator begins at the beginning by explaining that he was born into an especially “imaginative” and “excitable” family, hinting at a history of mental illness. He suggests vaguely that he had shown signs of his family’s “evil propensities” in early childhood. He will return to this point at various moments in the story, but never to clarify it, only to ominously emphasize its significance. 

The narrator then moves on to his preteen years at a primary school in a gothic English village. He is well-liked by all the other schoolboys—except one. This one happens to have the same first and last name as him. The narrator’s namesake competes with him at whatever activity he engages in and challenges every assertion he makes. The narrator always comes out about equal in these struggles with his double. But this equality itself causes him to fear that he will lose his distinctness among his peers. The double seems more interested in personally tormenting him than in gaining status, though. In this section, the narrator circles back several times to place special weight on the double having his same name. It’s almost as if the double has been conjured up out of an accidentally repeated incantation of the name, as in an echo. 

Not only does the narrator share a name with the other boy, but the two also arrived in the village on the same day. This causes older classmates to assume that the two are brothers. What’s more, as the narrator later learns, he and his double were born on the same date. The narrator notes that his double’s one comparable deficiency is that some throat abnormality makes it impossible for him to speak above a low whisper. This is perhaps the creepiest aspect of this story’s doppelgänger: his inability to speak at standard volumes actually amplifies the effectiveness of his words in the quiet, pregnant moments that he must wait for to communicate. 

Over time, in dress, physique, attitude, and mannerisms, the narrator’s namesake comes to resemble him more and more. And the double gradually learns to mimic the narrator perfectly in habits, gestures, and thinking as well. Strangely, the other boys never say anything about the double’s extensive campaign of imitation. The double’s motive for mirroring the narrator in every way lies in his desire to aggravate the narrator, for he knows that every point of similarity vexes him. Added to this, the double adopts a patronizing air toward the narrator, wherein he constantly offers unsolicited moral advice. Worst of all, the advice usually turns out to be good. That is, if the narrator had followed it, he would have been better off. During one especially heated argument, something in the double’s expression reminds the narrator of his earliest unformed memories. The excellent prose here suggests movement of an unconscious truth fighting to break through the liminal barrier. 

One night, the narrator creeps out of his room to play a prank on his double. He finds him asleep in his room. When he accidentally shines a lamp on him, he sees to his horror that his double’s face has changed to become identical to his own. It’s as if by imitating the narrator for so long, the double’s face has been reshaped to match the narrator’s. This causes the narrator to flee from the school that night, never to return. 

The narrator continues his education through secondary school, during which time he becomes a habitual partier, booze hound, and general ne’er-do-well. One night, his double tracks him down and briefly harasses him before disappearing into the night. The narrator is unable to locate him again. Soon the narrator progresses to university, where he becomes even more of a sot, womanizer, and gambler. He finds that he actually excels at gambling, though, which leads him to become a card shark who bilks his rich young associates. He manages to totally ruin one of them, taking his entire fortune in one game. At the moment of the narrator’s triumph, the double returns and reveals how he won through cheating. As a result, the narrator is expelled from university and must flee to Europe.

Wherever the narrator goes, his double follows him and frustrates all his schemes. So, the narrator resolves to kill his double the next time they meet. This occurs at a masquerade ball in Rome. The narrator is about seduce the host’s wife when his double stops him by whispering in his ear. The narrator grabs his double and throws him into a side room with a large mirror. The pair draw the rapiers that they each have as part of their identical matador costumes. They battle. The narrator gets the better of his double and stabs him repeatedly. The door is then thrown open by the other guests. When the narrator turns back, he finds that the double is gone. Only his reflection in the mirror remains. And this allows him to see that he has mortally wounded himself with his own rapier. (Presumably this whole account has been given while the narrator is on his death bed.) 

THOUGHTS & THEORIES:   

A common interpretation of this story is that it is an allegorical representation of conscience and the role it plays in a person’s life. Under this interpretation, the narrator’s doppelgänger is said to be an elaborate delusion that began in boyhood and grew progressively worse, due to ignoring his conscience while engaging in various vices. This is of course supported by the narrator’s own repeated reference to his family’s history of mental illness. That would make his doppelgänger of the antagonistic-self type, manifested as a dissociative hallucination, like what we saw in The Other and Black Swan. 

But to me, this interpretation seems too simple. Perhaps schoolboys are more apt to get away with behaviors that would otherwise be seen as symptoms of psychosis, such as carrying on one-sided debates with imaginary friends. But why then, if the narrator’s delusion starts small and grows progressively worse over the years, does his double begin fully formed as a boy that shares his name but is still distinct in other respects—a boy whom the other students acknowledge and interact with? I think that the story allows for a reading in which the doppelgänger exists outside of the narrator’s head just as much as it supports the reading in which it is entirely imaginary. 

If the doppelgänger does have some substantial reality, it might be as a psychic emergence through the narrator’s obsession. Perhaps some force within the narrator, like an ethereal beacon—as a product of his family’s weird affliction—drew a boy with the same name and the same birthday to be enrolled at the same school. And perhaps this force imposed the narrator’s obsession with his own conscience onto this other boy, so that he was mentally and physically transformed over time into the narrator’s doppelgänger. This condemned the other boy to become the puppet and the shadow of the narrator’s unconscious self. Then, in their final confrontation, the narrator was able to fully absorb the double into himself in the psychically volcanic act of stabbing the vessel of his own conscience. 

This would be like Blacula imposing the identity of his dead wife reborn onto Tina, or Billy’s pa imposing the role of murderer onto Billy, but by physically transformative means rather than through social coercion. A psychic force reshaping the human body in this way is best exemplified in David Cronenberg’s film The Brood (1979).

In any case, that both of these interpretations are available in the text is only one indication of how innovative this story is. Doppelgängers had appeared in folklore throughout the world, such as in the changeling tales of Northern Europe we looked at, but the narrative of a double appearing and taking over a protagonist’s life is original to Poe. ETA Hoffman’s 1815 novel The Devil’s Elixirs concerns a monk who uses a potion to awaken his lust and manifest it as his evil twin. This version of the doppelgänger is closer to Stevenson’s later novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than to what Poe is up to, though. Soon after Poe introduced his much richer and trickier version of the doppelgänger in this story, other major authors started stealing his invention and repurposing it for their own mind-screw tales, most notably Nathaniel Hawthorne in his 1842 story “Howe's Masquerade” and Dostoyevsky in his 1845 novella The Double (which, as mentioned, was itself rebooted a century later as The Man Who Haunted Himself).  

What “William Wilson” has that all the works inspired by it lack is a terrifying intimacy. It depicts the narrator’s protracted close relationship with his double as he grows more and more like him. Poe is unflinching in working through the horrifying implications of this situation, to a degree achieved by no one else. What could be more unnerving about our doppelgängers than how touchingly close they come to us while remaining radically set against us?