Essay Twins

To outwit someone it means you have deceived or defeated him or her by greater ingenuity. In the short story “Twins” by Eric Wright, there are many examples of how people can be easily outwitted. This short story is about a man who takes his wife to an old mine shaft to explain his next murder mystery novel. The wife realizes that he is actually planning to kill her, and is explaining everything to her. In a turn of events she ends up killing him and fulfilling his plan. Three areas in the story where Eric Wright shows how people can be easily outwitted are: when his wife figures out his plan and loads his gun with blanks, when she ends up turning his plan around on him, and finally when the police do not suspect her. These are all examples of how people can easily be outwitted because they show how the husband and the police were both clueless to the entire situation.

In the story, the husband believes he had devised an ingenious plan to murder his wife. When in fact, his wife had actually outwitted him, “She turned and saw that her last question was answered. It wasn’t a game” (Wright 216). Throughout the entire trip to the mine shaft the wife had been suspicious about the husband’s motives. It is at that moment of the story that the wife suspicions are confirmed. “’It’ll work, all right. It’s going to work.’ He pulled the trigger once, twice, three times” (wright 216). Although the readers do not know it yet, this is when his wife turns his plan around on him. After he shoots three times he realizes that nothing shot out of the gun. His wife then turns to him, pulls out a gun and shoots him. This part in the short story reflects how people can be easily outwitted because the husband thought that he had perfected his plan, when in fact his wife had figured it out, and outwitted him by replaces that bullets in his gun with blanks.

In the days before the trip to the mineshaft, the wife had become suspicious of her husbands actions. The wife had noticed some