Doppelgängers in literature

Doppelganger in "William Wilson"

A Doppelganger ("double goer" in German) is a double or second-self. In literature, dream analysis, or archetypal symbolism, the Doppelganger is often figured as a twin, shadow, or mirror-image of the protagonist. The Doppelganger characteristically appears as identical to (or closely resembling) the protagonist; sometimes the protagonist and Doppelganger have the same name. Prominent literary examples of Doppelgangers include Poe's "William Wilson," Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Double, Al-Tayyib Salih's Season of Migration to the North, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

In its simplest incarnation, mistaken identity is a classic trope used in literature, from Twelfth Night (as Jennifer & Larry will recall) to A Tale of Two Cities. But in these cases, the characters look similar for perfectly normal reasons, such as being siblings or simple coincidence. These are NOT doppelgangers.

Other stories offer supernatural explanations for doubles. These doppelgängers are typically, but not always, dark or evil in some way. The double will often impersonate the victim and go about ruining them, for instance through committing crimes or insulting the victim's friends (like in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde). Sometimes, the double even tries to kill the original. The torment is occasionally earned; for instance, in Edgar Allan Poe's short story William Wilson, the protagonist of questionable morality is dogged by his doppelgänger most tenaciously when his morals fail.

When doppelgängers are used as harbingers of impending destruction, they are almost always supernaturally based. Doppelgängers are sometimes the evil copies of the player in games. They are usually meant as 'the final test', conquering yourself. Another variant, usually seen in science fiction, involves clones, which creates a genetically identical new being without the memories and experiences of the original. Some futuristic variants in fiction duplicate living beings in their entirety, albeit sometimes with modified memories and motives.

Doubles are also seen in fiction involving time travel and parallel universes, as in The Time Traveller's Wife. In this case, the doppelgänger really "is" the doubled person, but from a different timeline or different version of the universe.

Trivia: Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was convinced he had a doppelganger? Carl Sandburg's biography contains the following:

A dream or illusion had haunted Lincoln at times through the winter. On the evening of his election he had thrown himself on one of the haircloth sofas at home, just after the first telegrams of November 6 had told him he was elected President, and looking into a bureau mirror across the room he saw himself full length, but with two faceIt bothered him; he got up; the illusion vanished; but when he lay down again there in the glass again were two faces, one paler than the other. He got up again, mixed in the election excitement, forgot about it; but it came back, and haunted him. He told his wife about it; she worried too. A few days later he tried it once more and the illusion of the two faces again registered to his eyes. But that was the last; the ghost since then wouldn't come back, he told his wife, who said it was a sign he would be elected to a second term, and the death pallor of one face meant he wouldn't live through his second term.