William Wilson
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Description:
William Wilson is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839. It is one of the most famous of doppelgänger tales.
Doppelgänger is the German word for a ghostly double of a living person. The word comes from doppel meaning "double" and gänger translated as "goer". The term has, in the vernacular, come to refer to any double of a person, most commonly in reference to a so-called evil twin, or to bilocation. Alternatively, the word is used to describe a phenomenon where you catch your own image out of the corner of your eye. In some mythologies, seeing one's own doppelgänger is an omen of death. A doppelganger seen by friends or relatives of a person may sometime bring bad luck, omen or is an indication of an approaching illness or health problem.
The Doppelgängers of folklore cast no shadow and no reflection in a mirror or in water. They are supposed to provide advice to the person they shadow, but this advice could be misleading or malicious. They could also, in rare instances, plant ideas in their victim's mind or appear before friends and relatives, causing confusion.
WILLIAM WILSON.
By Edger Allen Poe
What say of it? what say of CONscience grim,
That spectre in my path?
Chamberlayne's Pharronida.
LET me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn -- for the horror -- for the detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? 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?
I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime. This epoch -- these later years -- took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude, whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign. Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle. From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus. What chance -- what one event brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate. Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. I long, in passing through the dim valley, for the sympathy -- I had nearly said for the pity -- of my fellow men. I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error. I would have them allow -- what they cannot refrain from allowing -- that, although temptation may have erewhile existed as great, man was never thus, at least, tempted before -- certainly, never thus fell. And is it therefore that he has never thus suffered? Have I not indeed been living in a dream? And am I not now dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions?
I am the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable; and, in my earliest infancy, I gave evidence of having fully inherited the family character. As I advanced in years it was more strongly developed; becoming, for many reasons, a cause of serious disquietude to my friends, and of positive injury to myself. I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions. Weak-minded, and beset with constitutional infirmities akin to my own, my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me. Some feeble and ill-directed efforts resulted in complete failure on their part, and, of cour
