How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime. (2)
William says that his deeds are so horrible, he couldn’t express them even if he wanted to. This inability of his writing to accurately reflect reality is another barrier to our understanding what really happened in his past.
Quote #2
Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. (2)
William may be referring to either figurative or literal death.
Quote #3
Thenceforward my voice was a household law; and at an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my own actions. (3)
The narrator is used to being in control; he controls and creates the world of his narration the same way he dictated his own terms when he was a kid.
Quote #4
Yet this superiority—even this equality—was in truth acknowledged by no one but myself; our associates, by some unaccountable blindness, seemed not even to suspect it. Indeed, his competition, his resistance, and especially his impertinent and dogged interference with my purposes, were not more pointed than private. (14)
Here we begin to suspect that the second William Wilson may have been a figment of the first William’s imagination, because no one else notices that he exists.
Quote #5
Perhaps it was this latter trait in Wilson's conduct, conjoined with our identity of name, and the mere accident of our having entered the school upon the same day… (15)
As more and more details like this one are revealed, we grow less and less comfortable with William’s version of the story.
Quote #6
I cannot better describe the sensation which oppressed me than by saying that I could with difficulty shake off the belief of my having been acquainted with the being who stood before me, at some epoch very long ago—some point of the past even infinitely remote. The delusion, however, faded rapidly as it came; and I mention it at all but to define the day of the last conversation I there held with my singular namesake. (24)
Wilson still does not understand the meaning of this event from his childhood, suggesting that he lacks the perspective of his readers.
Quote #7
The vortex of thoughtless folly into which I there so immediately and so recklessly plunged, washed away all but the froth of my past hours, engulfed at once every solid or serious impression, and left to memory only the veriest levities of a former existence. (27)
The narrator uses vice as an escape from reality.
Quote #8
Who, indeed, among my most abandoned associates, would not rather have disputed the clearest evidence of his senses, than have suspected of such courses, the gay, the frank, the generous William Wilson—the noblest and most commoner at Oxford—him whose follies (said his parasites) were but the follies of youth and unbridled fancy—whose errors but inimitable whim—whose darkest vice but a careless and dashing extravagance? (33)
This passage speaks to the ability of men to ignore evidence in the name of wishful thinking – something our narrator does throughout his entire story.