Poe's Stories brief biography of edgar allan poe
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Short Story By Flannery OConnor
| William’s imagination, conscience, and disturbed, overactive mind, is limitless. There is no earthly place that William can find that is not immediately accessible to the rival. William hurries to the final stage of the story. He admits that through all these encounters, he had been frightened of his doppelganger. He had felt deep awe as well as terror, which had stopped him from fighting back. As time goes on, he drinks more and more and his temper worsens, and as it does, he becomes more firm with his rival. He feels that in becoming more courageous he creates the opposite transformation in the other William. He feels hopeful that his curse won’t last forever. So far the two Williams have shared a balance of love and hate and never crossed the line into dangerous violence – they seem to value each other’s presence too much to risk harming the other, but the tables are starting to turn, which forebodes that something might happen to get the balance back. At Carnival time in Rome, William has been drinking and moves, frustrated, through the crowd. He is even more impatient because he has an object of interest in the crowd, a married woman, who had told him what she would be wearing so he could spot her in the masses. But just at this moment, he hears the dreaded whisper again. Enraged, William turns and grabs his rival by the collar of his identical costume and fires insults at him and drags him into an adjoining room. The double is wearing a veil over his face. Carnivals and masked balls are used by Poe to disguise his characters and also to confront disguises. Here, the climax of the doppelganger plot is full of layers of costumes, veils and disguises. The truth of the double’s identity and the explanation of his power over William should be about to be revealed, but the veil blocks us from seeing the double clearly. Now, William throws him into the room and shuts the door and draws his sword. The other William reluctantly also draws. After a brief fight, William has his double pinned and vulnerable and stabs him repeatedly in the heart. Someone is trying to enter the room but William prevents them. He goes back to the body of his nemesis, but is shocked to find that the room has changed. Now, a mirror stands in the room and presents to him a reflection of his own figure, but covered in blood. As the figure comes to meet him, he sees that it is also the other William, and when he speaks, it is as if he himself is speaking. Ina voice, no longer a whisper, he tells William that he has murdered himself. The true shape of William’s almost lifelong pursuer becomes manifest to him at last. The disorder of William’s childhood mind has transformed his vision of the world. The figure of the other William disappears and shows itself to be a shape-shifting mirage created by William’s disordered mind. The outside world and the inside world of William’s mind have fused. The double now seems not so much a double as an opposite side of William himself, and in killing it he kills himself. Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2017 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com Page 33 THE MURDERS IN THE RUE-MORGUE The story begins with along description of the analytical mind”. First, the narrator of "Rue-Morgue" describes how the analytical mind delights in untangling a problem as the athlete enjoys physical exertion. The way he uncovers the truth is so perfectly methodical that it often seems like a natural instinct. He goes onto explain that though mathematics is similar to the art of analysis, it is not pure calculation that he’s talking about. The narrator’s description of the analytical mind is a mysterious departure from the apparent gore that the story’s title advertises Download 0.58 Mb. Share with your friends:
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