William Wilson; Poe

Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation.

William struggles to understand his own identity in this text; but now we, too, are faced with a similar difficulty. Identity

Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned!—to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations?—and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?

William repeats the same ideas his double uttered at the end of the text. Identity

Of this church the principal of our school was pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man, with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,—-could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution!

This passage hints at the paradox of the two William Wilsons. identity

I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime

William says that his deeds are so horrible, he couldn't express them even if he wanted to. This inability of his writing to accurately reflect reality is another barrier to our understanding what really happened in his past. Versions of Reality

Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit.

William may be referring to either figurative or literal death. Versions of reality

Thenceforward my voice was a household law; and at an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my own actions.

The narrator is used to being in control; he controls and creates the world of his narration the same way he dictated his own terms when he was a kid. Versions of Reality

Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation.

The unreliable narrator sets the stage for the theme of deceit. Lie and Deceit

Upon mankind at large the events of very early existence rarely leave in mature age any definite impression. All is gray shadow—a weak and irregular remembrance—an indistinct regathering of feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric pains. With me this is not so. In childhood I must have felt with the energy of a man what I now find stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as deep, and as durable as the exergues of the Carthaginian medals.

The narrator's repeated insistence that he remembers this very well actually brings to surface the suspect nature of memory. Lie and Deceit

Perhaps it was this latter trait in Wilson's conduct, conjoined with our identity of name, and the mere accident of our having entered the school upon the same day...

The more William insists that all is coincidence, the more we are convinced it is not. Lie and Deceit

As it was, I at length grew restive in the extreme under his distasteful supervision, and daily resented more and more openly what I considered his intolerable arrogance. I have said that, in the first years of our connexion as schoolmates, my feelings in regard to him might have been easily ripened into friendship: but, in the latter months of my residence at the academy, although the intrusion of his ordinary manner had, beyond doubt, in some measure, abated, my sentiments, in nearly similar proportion, partook very much of positive hatred.

Guilt and Blame

Summary

"William Wilson" begins with a distraught narrator introducing himself with a fake name: William Wilson. He doesn't want to tell you his real name. He would like you to sit and listen to his story, the story of his fall into true and terrible evil, and if you wouldn't mind, try to feel some sympathy for him, as he was the victim of fated circumstances beyond his control.

William's story begins in his childhood; he always had an overactive imagination and a strong will and a propensity for vice. When he was in school, he dominated all of the other boys - except for one, another young lad who also had the name William Wilson, who was the same age and looked exactly the same as our narrator. The two boys competed in every way, and the second William Wilson often stopped the first from doing anything immoral. One night, truly horrified by the identical nature of this other boy to himself, our narrator flees the schoolhouse.

He ends up next at Eton, but before long finds himself tormented by a masked and cloaked figure whom he knows to be the second William Wilson. He goes on to Oxford and engages in vice to no end, only to find that the masked double is behind him once again. One night, after winning an exorbitant amount at cards, William's double shows up and reveals that he has been cheating.

William travels all over the world but cannot escape the second William Wilson. One night, at a masquerade ball, he decides to finally put an end to this. He takes his double into a private room and stabs him fatally - only to find that, rather than facing a second William Wilson, he faces only his own reflection in a mirror. His reflection tells him that he only lived through his double, and that now he has murdered himself.

Narrator

We refer to him as William Wilson throughout this Shmoop Guide, but it's important to remember that we don't actually know the narrator's name. This is a great hallmark of the old classic Poe unreliable narrator - we talk all about the implications of such unreliability in "Point of View," which you should definitely check out.

Now onto the juicy stuff. "William Wilson" explores the theme of the doppelganger, or ghostly double. The second William Wilson is the doppelganger of the first William Wilson; he looks just like him, talks just like him, has the same name, birthday, and tags along behind him all across the world. The mystery and suspense of the story lie in two basic big questions: what exactly is the nature of this second William Wilson, and what is his relationship to the first?

What makes these questions so difficult is that the narrator doesn't really know to answer them himself. As he tells his story, he seems as baffled by the similarities between him and his double NOW as he was when he was a kid at Dr. Bransby's school. Still, we get enough hints from the author - as opposed to the narrator (for a discussion of the differences, see "Tone") - that we can take a pretty good stab (pun intended!) at what's going on here.

As we discuss in "What's Up With the Epigraph?", the easiest explanation for the doppelganger madness is that William Wilson #2 is the personified conscience of William Wilson #1. He's our narrator's Jiminy Cricket! Poe has taken the internal struggle we all feel when we want to do something bad but know we ought to resist and played it out externally. The little angel on William's shoulder has come to life -at least in his imagination, which in a first-person narrated story is as good as reality.

You're going to want to check out "What's Up With the Ending," where we discuss a few possible interpretations of the novel's ending. In summary: either William kills himself literally, or he kills his good half, his conscience. The tricky part comes in reconciling your choice of interpretations with the frame of the story, with the introduction that the narrator gives in the first two paragraphs of the text. At what point is he telling this story? Where is he and what is going on? And WHY is he telling us this story?

William seems concerned, on some level, with garnering some sympathy from his readers. He asks us to look for an element of fatality in his story, to believe that the events which transpired were in fact beyond his control. After reading the story, this seems like, in a phrase, a load of garbage. William spends his whole life engaging in vice only to finally murder his better half in an attempt to have free reign over his ungovernable passions. That's not fate - that's a truckload of bad behavior. The narrator's absurd request that we pardon him for his sins is a testament to what is possibly a criminally insane mind.

And yet, we do feel bad, on some level, for poor William Wilson, especially when we remember that his torment is all self-inflicted. If you buy that the doppelganger is his conscience, then William outs himself for cheating at cards. He tries to stop himself from the romantic rendezvous with Di Broglio's wife. And he seems to be still trying, even after supposedly murdering his conscience, to lead a good life! After all, he condemns his sinful actions in his introduction - he doesn't defend them. "William Wilson" becomes, in this light, a confession, a way for the narrator to purge himself of the sins he has committed by airing his dirty laundry.