How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. (1)
William struggles to understand his own identity in this text; but now we, too, are faced with a similar difficulty.
Quote #2
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.
Quote #3
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! (6)
This passage hints at the paradox of the two William Wilsons.
Quote #4
But the house!—how quaint an old building was this!—to me how veritably a palace of enchantment! There was really no end to its windings—to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be. (9)
Sounds like an iteration of the story’s doppelganger theme… (Doppelganger means ghostly double.)
Quote #5
Notwithstanding a noble descent, mine was one of those everyday appellations which seem, by prescriptive right, to have been, time out of mind, the common property of the mob. (13)
William insists again that he is of noble descent – why is this so important to him?
Quote #6
The words were venom in my ears; and when, upon the day of my arrival, a second William Wilson came also to the academy, I felt angry with him for bearing the name, and doubly disgusted with the name because a stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its twofold repetition, who would be constantly in my presence, and whose concerns, in the ordinary routine of the school business, must inevitably, on account of the detestable coincidence, be often confounded with my own. (18)
William resents having to share his identity with another man as much as resents William interfering with his life.
Quote #7
Were these—these the lineaments of William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they were his, but I shook as if with a fit of the ague in fancying they were not. What was there about them to confound me in this manner? I gazed;—while my brain reeled with a multitude of incoherent thoughts. Not thus he appeared—assuredly not thus—in the vivacity of his waking hours. The same name! the same contour of person! the same day of arrival at the academy! (26)
This is the last time that William is able to look his double in the face. If you read the rest of the story you’ll notice that he never takes a good look at him again. This shows that William willingly ignores the facts he doesn’t want to confront.