The doppelganger literary tradition treats the double as internal projection requiring self-destruction

Evidence

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson,” for instance, the reader begins by believing the “detestable coincidence” that there is another person with the same name, birthday, and general appearance as the pompous narrator. Suspicions quickly emerge, though, that the coincidences are a little too perfect. By the end, it is clear that the double, who could not speak “above a very low whisper,” never existed outside the narrator’s paranoid, self-loathing subconscious and that, by killing his “arch-enemy and evil genius,” William Wilson had killed himself. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 82

Categorization

• XREF: Establishes the psychoanalytic doppelganger frame (self-loathing projected outward) that Klein will later invert or extend with the real Naomi Wolf — a useful contrast to the traditional reading. — connects to: Materializing the phantasm of the double destroys its power — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 322; The narcissist’s self-relation is doomed because no double exists — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1834
• DEFINE: Defines the classic doppelganger arc: the double is the self, and killing it is suicide.