In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson,” for instance, the reader begins by believing the “detestable coincidence” that there is another person with the same name, birthday, and general appearance as the pompous narrator. Suspicions quickly emerge, though, that the coincidences are a little too perfect. By the end, it is clear that the double, who could not speak “above a very low whisper,” never existed outside the narrator’s paranoid, self-loathing subconscious and that, by killing his “arch-enemy and evil genius,” William Wilson had killed himself.

DEFINE: Clarifies the reveal in Poe's 'William Wilson' — the apparent double is an externalized projection of the narrator's own self-loathing, not a separate person.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 82