Plot
Alan Talbot seems to be an average man leading a seemingly normal life. He falls in love with a woman named Jessica Connelly. One day, he starts hearing strange noises that give him head pains and the urge to kill. As a result, he throws a religious fanatic under a train.
Upon visiting his home-town with Jessica, his memory seems to betray him. Nothing in the town is as he remembers. While seeking answers, he comes face to face with his double. It turns out that he is an android created in the image of Walter Ryder, provided with Walter's memories from twenty years before. Alan is the third prototype and has been "living" for eight days, as Walter had tried to create a less flawed image of himself. Unfortunately, Alan is insane and can't be fixed; he stabbed Walter with a pair of scissors before escaping.
Knowing what he really truly is, Alan tells Walter all about Jessica so that Walter can replace him, but he then malfunctions and tries to kill Walter. After the struggle with an ambiguous outcome, the survivor goes to Jessica in the morning, and is implied that the two will marry. In the final scene, it is revealed that the survivor is Walter while Alan lies amid the wreckage of the laboratory where he was "born".
Read more about this topic: In His Image
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)