The Similarities Between 'William Wilson And Fight Club'

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What would you do if you were to come across someone nearly exactly like yourself, yet with the qualities you wish you had? Someone exactly like you on the surface, but yet they are more suave, more handsome, and more intelligent than you could ever hope to be. The concept of the “doppelganger”, or, a body double of a living person, is a concept that has existed for nearly as long as mankind had begun crafting their first stories. In both the short story “William Wilson” by Edgar Allen Poe, and the film “Fight Club”, directed by David Fincher, the concept of doppelgangers is explored throughout each work through the assistance of the unwitting narrator in both stories. While a number of similarities can be deferred through each story, there …show more content…

​The first most noticeable similarity between both “William Wilson” and “Fight Club” is the style of narration employed by the main character in each story; both forego their “true” names in order to mask their identities; indeed, it could actually be argued that there is no need for the reader to know either of the characters’ actual identities. As the narrator in “William Wilson” states; “Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation.” Both narrators choose given names that the reader is asked to refer to them as; in the case of “William Wilson”, the main character is to be referred to as the titular William Wilson; in “Fight Club”, the narrator refers to himself as Jack. It …show more content…

Jack from “Fight Club”, due to his apparent insomnia, which is actually implied to be a metaphor for the collective slumber of the post-feminism industrial male, spins his tale in a nearly half-awake stupor, always meandering through the plot thread by thread, as if he were waiting for his misery to all come to an end. On the other hand, William Wilson narrates his story as if he is not accepting of his role as the “original”, the source of his doppelganger. William Wilson voices his disbelief in the fact that his body double could be related to himself constantly, almost never accepting this possibility until it reaches its virtual tipping point. In this sense, the narrators of each story are almost exact opposites; Jack accepts his fate, while William Wilson wholeheartedly rejects it. It is this complete difference in philosophical beliefs that so clearly draws the line between the societies in both “William Wilson” and “Fight Club” were conceived and written

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