Characterisation

From the beginning the narrator seems to be an untruthful person. He doesn't give his real name instead gives a false name William Wilson. "Let me call myself, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real apellation" (p 168). the narrator could have not given a name at all, instead he chose to lie and for this reason I was a little dubious about whether or not to trust him.
WilliamWilson was a mentally ill person. He disassociated himself from his alter ego to the point he believed the other William Wilson was an actual person emulating him "his cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in in actions; and must admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy, mygait and general manner were, without diffculty, appropiated; inspite of his constitutional defect even my voice did not escape him"(p 175). And to credit with veracity the existence of the other William Wilson, the narrator mentions how the other William Wilson was his rival that tyrannized him. "I did not pretend to diguise from my perception the identity of the singular individual who this perseveringly interfered with my affairs and harassed me" (p 179).
William Wilson was rebellious as a child in which his parents were incapable of restraining him. "weakminded, my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me" (p 169). In later years the narrator continued to be rebellious after the several confrontations with his alter ego's attempt to expose his mischief behavior "in no one of the multiplied instance in which he had of late crossed my path, to frustrate those schemes, or to disturb those actions, which it fully carried out, might have resulted in bitter mishief. Poor justification this, intruth, for an authority so imperiously assumed! Poor idemnity for natural rights of self-agency so pertinaciously, so insultingly denied! (p 184).
The narrator was a smart person. He exhibited it through his competitive nature in academics through his early years and making it to graduate school in the latter.