Double Trouble

There he is again.  A twin: a mirror you.  His smile is not welcome. Your mood darkens; you are beside yourself.  How dare he be him and be you?

II.

William Wilson first meets his double in the English country, as a schoolboy.  Wilson's tyrannical nature has already found expression, being "left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my own actions." <1> At Reverend Dr. Bransby's Academy, the "ardency, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness" of Wilson's personality allows him to dominate others; with one exception. Wilson sees the exception as a double, and rival.  "In his rivalry...he mingled with his injuries, his insults, or his contradictions, a certain most inappropriate, and assuredly most unwelcome affectionateness of manner."  How dare he? Wilson plots revenge, to the "whole extent of the malice of which I was imbued".  But at the crucial moment, his nerve fails him. Wilson leaves the school, immediately.

A few months pass, and now Wilson is set to continue his education at Eton.  This turns out to be "three years of folly, passed without profit", with Wilson developing a taste for wild drunkenness. Then, one night, Wilson is visited by the double he'd thought to have left at the Academy.  "Seizing me by the arm...[he] whispered the words 'William Wilson!' in my ear." Unsettling as the event is, Wilson is soon diverted by his plans to attend Oxford.

Oxford, and Wilson confides to transgressing "even the common restraints of decency in the mad infatuation of my revels." When his double next appears, it's to reveal Wilson a ruthless cheater at cards. There is crisp disdain in the host's words as he turns Wilson out.  "'You will see the necessity, I hope, of quitting Oxford - at all events, of quitting, instantly, my chambers'".  Quiet comedy attends the passage, as Wilson departs Oxford (immediately).  "I commenced a hurried journey from Oxford to the continent, in a perfect agony of horror and of shame."

III.

Horror and shame, Wilson tells us.  He doesn't allow them to check his dissolute ways on the continent, however.  At a carnival masquerade in Rome, a final meeting between Wilson&Wilson concludes the narrative.  "William Wilson" is charged with suggestion, presenting some of Edgar Allan Poe's best work in the short story.
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<1>Poe, Edgar Allan. "William Wilson. A Tale". The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Second Edition, 1986).