Poe's use of doubles in dreams

A detailed Summary of Poe's use of doubles in dreams

Poe's Use of Doubles in Dream States

Doublings and feelings of de ja vu exist in life everywhere. Yet when coincidences become too much to believe, one questions if the experience is really happening or if it is a dream. In "The Black Cat" and "William Wilson", Poe uses doubling to illustrate the dream-like state in which these stories take place.

William Wilson's double is also named William Wilson. The two Wilsons meet as children in school. Each time Wilson found something else about the other Wilson that resembled himself, he became angrier. He realized "we were of the same age; but I saw that we were of the same height, and I perceived that we were even singularly alike in general contour of person and outline of feature." (Poe 309) Wilson believed the double was purposely imitating him. The double wore the same clothing as Wilson. He also imitated Wilson's walk and speech. The double, however, could not speak above a whisper. Yet Wilson and his double were, otherwise, exactly alike in appearance.

"The Black Cat" has more subtle instances of doubling. The night the narrator kills the first black cat he owned there is a fire in the man's house. When he returns to the ruins of his home, he finds only one

When the narrator of The Black Cat returns home from a night of drinking, the cat irritates him when it began to avoid him. He cuts out the eye of the cat yet in the morning, "when reason returned" (Poe 109), he experienced some regret but soon he "drowned in wine all memory of the deed" (Poe 109). In these lines of the story, Poe adds to the dream-like quality of the story by making the narrator extremely intoxicated. Not only was the narrator drunk the night of the incident, he drank the night after and noted that it "drowned in wine all memory of the deed" (Poe 109). This makes parts of the story seem uncanny since the original event happened in an intoxicated state, and soon after the incident was clouded again by more alcohol.

After the narrator kills the cat by hanging it from a tree, there is a fire in his house that evening. He was "aroused from sleep" (Poe 110) by screams from outside his window when the fire began. This also adds to the dream-state the narrator is always in. He is woken up from sleep so it is unsure if what he sees is reality or part of a dream. It is not uncommon to have a dream and believe one is awake when, in fact, one is still sound asleep in bed.

Doubling is present in reality every day. Coincidences are usually not completely unbelievable. Yet when they reach into the realm of the uncanny, as Poe's characters experience, it is difficult to decide what is reality and what is a dream. The use of doubles helps Poe create the feeling that the stories are too unbelievable to be true, yet the detail with which the narrator tells the story makes it difficult to question it.

the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber...The falling of the other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture. (Poe 1991: 111)

William Wilson is also always unsur

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Approximate Word count = 1359
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English