The Function Of The Narrator In Poe's William Wilson
(Poe, Edgar Allan)
In William Wilson. A Tale, Wilson?s doppleganger attends school with him and acts as a sort of super-ego antagonist, exposing him as a cheat in a game of cards, and thwating his criminal ambitions in different countries. At the end of the story, Wilson?s doppleganger (who was born the same day as Wilson, of the same appearance, and clothed in the same way) whispers in his ear, so he throws him outside and stabs him, where suddenly appearing is a mirror at the end of the room, and Wilson in a scene taken from the scene where that guy got impaled on the glass of a huge window, in the movie Ghost (he?s soon carried off by demons), half-realizes that he has probably just stabbed himself.
By masking his real identity, the effect of the narrator is to put doubt on the idea that a living person is narrating the story. A ghost narrator is more likely to assume a name because he probably isn?t all that attached to the one he had in life. The words ?for the present? in the aforementioned quote, suggest that the narrator has taken to calling himself by different names or would call himself by different names or better, has taken to referring to himself by different names at different times, suggesting a changing of identities through time (or through death).
This also has the effect of making the narrator seem outside the realm of his or a living character by giving him a consciousness outside of that assigned by society (a name), splitting his identity into a socially assigned one (unmentioned) and the ?William Wilson? that he gives himself and his doppleganger. This all plays into the mystery of and the making of the doppleganger antagonist. What happens at the end is a mystery, as either a ghost narrator looks at his dead reflection, or he kills his doppleganger and realizes that at least in some way to the world and to its hopes, he too is murdered. www.valiantdeath.com ---- for wonderful experimental music/ art/ zines
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