Line #24 TomatoInTheMirror/Literature


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6	[[TomatoInTheMirror Tomatoes in the Mirror]] in literature.
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10	* This happens in ''Literature/The39Clues'', at the end of Book #7 - "The Viper's Nest". Near the end, they discover that Amy and Dan are Madrigals.
11	* In ''Literature/TheAdorationOfJennaFox'', the titular character Jenna wakes up from a year-long coma after an unspecified accident with no memories of her life. Her parents say that she'll remember with time, and she does begin doing so, but it doesn't take her long to realize that something's off, something her parents are hiding from her. TheReveal is that 90% of Jenna is artificial and only 10% of her brain is from her old self. Oh, and the operation to give her a new body after the car accident is illegal, which is why her parents are hiding out in a secluded place. She even says "I'm not a tomato" at one point; it does [[ItMakesSenseInContext make sense in context]].
12	* In ''Ancestral Night'' by Creator/ElizabethBear, Haimey's backstory, as she remembers it at the book's start, is that she grew up in a culty HiveMind subculture called a clade, and during her mandatory year away from the clade (required by the larger polity called the Synarche so she was making an informed and uninfluenced decision about it) she hooked up with a woman who had exciting political views, believing that the Synarche and the clade were basically the same thing, since they were both trying to control what individuals think. She was absolutely horrified when the woman turned out to be a suicide bomber, who inexplicably decided to trigger her vest while they were on a date. The justice system concluded that she wasn't involved, but her clademothers were so offended by the scandal that they turned their backs on her, which at least spared her having to fight for her continued independence, and she hasn't been in contact with them since. She's aware her memories have been edited, both by the Synarche due to the trauma and by the clade to protect their secrets, but she's sure of the basics. It turns out [[spoiler: she was the one who actually made the bombs. The bewilderment she felt was not that she was in a relationship with a suicide bomber, but that her lover had triggered it ''without her''. She thought her involvement in terrorism was a way of getting back at her clademothers, but they'd actually programmed her to do this, hating the Synarche as much as the anarcho-libertarians, but for opposite reasons. And they've never contacted her again because, when the Synarche confronted them with evidence of this, the clade ''committed mass suicide''.]]
13	* ''Literature/AniDroids'':
14	** In the original novella ''Literature/{{Argo}}'', Mira, the only human character, finds out at the climax that she, as well as most if not all the human race, is an android.
15	** In the rewrite and expansion Mira is a flesh-and-blood human, at first. But in the final chapter she wakes up to discover that she's been replaced by an android programmed with most of her memories, save that her adventures in the book were replaced by a fake vacation to Cuba. While her unedited consciousness has been downloaded into an ani-droid!
16	* ''Literature/{{Another}}'': Built in to the curse affecting Class 3-3. Because of an incident where students pretended a dead student was still alive, now each year a [[DeadAllAlong dead person]] (the "extra") will show up in Class 3-3. Nobody knows who it is, not even the extra themselves, because everyone's memories are altered to fit the extra's appearance. The trouble is, with the extra present, there's now an imbalance between life and death in class 3-3, and to fix the problem, people connected to the class will die until the extra is killed. Quite the kick in the teeth to find out that you're dead and you're causing all your friends' deaths, and they have to kill you again to survive.
17	* At the end of Diana Wynne Jones's ''Literature/ArchersGoon'', Howard Sykes finds that he is Venturus, and that he's keeping all his siblings stuck in one place in time and space.
18	%% * In "The Beast of 309", a man who lost his eye as a child works for a long time to afford a cloned replacement. The medics say it will take over four years to grow. At the end, [[spoiler:he has a cardiac arrest, and the medics say there is also a heart transplant available somehow in case it is needed. Then he connects the dots with the fact [[WalkingTransplant his own eye has been lost when he was four]]... thankfully, the new heart wasn't needed in the end.]]
19	* "Literature/BigfootDreams": Duke and Earl manage to find Clinton's mauled corpse and they all realize that the Clinton they've been communicating with was a bigfoot, having turned into Clinton after undergoing the ritual to become human. Even Clinton didn't know it until he saw the body.
20	* Subverted in ''Literature/BreakfastOfChampions'' wherein a man of declining mental health becomes convinced that failed Sci-Fi writer Kilgore Trout's short story really is a letter from God revealing his Tomato in the Mirror status.
21	* The short story ''The Copy'' by Creator/PaulJennings features a copy machine (which creates a mirror-image replica of objects put into it) which a boy uses to copy himself so he can beat down a bully, but becomes jealous of his copy and kills him. Afterwards, his mother remarks that it's odd -- his mole used to be on the other cheek, and he's writing with his left hand instead of his right...
22	* Done twice in the ''Crucible'' trilogy by Sara Douglass. First, the protagonist goes out to return the demons to Hell -- only to find out that both his wife and best friend (and soon-to-be-king) are demons. Then, when the antagonist role shifts to the angels, he discovers he is an angel too, and thus doomed to send all mankind into eternal slavery. Poor Tom.
23	* In ''Literature/DanganronpaZero'', protagonist [[AmnesiacHero Ryoko Otonashi]] is revealed to be [[BigBad Junko Enoshima]] [[LaserGuidedAmnesia with all her memories removed]]. Her boyfriend, Yasuke Matsuda, had been wiping her memories and planting fake ones in a journal she created by her own request. All just as a method of testing out memory-erasing methods for the killing school life. The HeyYou treatment she gets from everyone is already a big hint that her name isn't real, and other characters who do recognize her as Enoshima never get to call her by name to misdirect the reader.
24	* ''Literature/DarkerThanYouThink'': Will Barbee is ultimately revealed to be the Child of Night, whose identity he has been seeking throughout the story.
25	* In ''Literature/DarkestPowers'', the audience knows that Liz is dead, however when Chloe tells her she goes into denial until someone else later confirms it.
26	* At the climax of ''Literature/TheDemonsLexicon'' by Sarah Rees-Brennan, Nick, the protagonist, learns that he's not human--he's actually a demon who was bound into the body of an infant and grew up thinking it was his own.
27	* ''Series/DoctorWho'' [[Franchise/DoctorWhoExpandedUniverse Expanded Universe]]: Repple finding out he is not Shade Vassily but a clockwork robot in ''[[Recap/NewSeriesAdventuresTheClockwiseMan The Clockwise Man]]''.
28	%%* ''Literature/TheLastDragonChronicles'': Agawin is Alexa.
29	* In ''Literature/EmilyTheStrangeStrangerAndStranger'', after losing the Emily Jeopardy, Emily discovers that she may be the clone Emily, not the real one.
30	* ''The End of Summer'' by Creator/AlgisBudrys, is set on an Earth where humans -- and all other mammals -- are effectively immortal, their bodies automatically resetting from all non-fatal damage and disease; as a consequence, they have all lost the ability to form long-term memories, and carry artificial backups that they re-upload daily. The main character, Fay, accidentally kills a young boy's pet dog, and sets out to find a way to grow a new one to adulthood. This involves working out how the global immortality works -- and he realises that he's the person who caused the global immortality, and the subsequent global stagnation.
31	* While Alexandra from ''Literature/TheFallenWorld'' often talks about how much carnage she saw during the [[WarIsHell Alpha Centauri Campaign]], but even she didn't even realize just how bad it got for her. As it turns out, she isn't the original personality but an alter created by the AI Arcadia when she tried to [[DriventoSuicide kill herself]]. She was temporally turned into an AI and became part of Arcadia's gestalt. During that time she gave up all of the EFSN's secrets she knew to Arcadia, including the codes to Arcadia's ExplosiveLeash. The original personality sleeps in the back of her mind until [[HeroicSafeMode she is pushed to far]].
32	* ''Literature/FeverSeries'': In ''Shadowfever'', Mackayla Lane figures out fairly early in the story that [[NormallyIWouldBeDeadNow she must be some kind of Tomato since she's still alive.]] Afterwards, the plot is divided between Mackayla trying to figure out who or what she really is and the search for the [[TomeOfEldritchLore Sinsar Dubh]] which has been the MacGuffin of the entire series. In the end, it is revealed that Mackayla was imbued with the essence of the Sinsar Dubh before she was born.
33	* A recurring idea in ''The Fifth Head of Cerberus'' is Veil's Hypothesis. The book is set on twin planets whose shapeshifting aboriginal natives were exterminated by human settlers. But a mysterious anthropologist named Veil proposes that it was in fact the ''natives'' who slaughtered the colonists, adopted their form, and have forgotten that they were anything other than human. The truth or falsity of this hypothesis is left for the reader to puzzle out.
34	* In the Creator/DianaWynneJones novella ''The Game'', heroine Hayley lives a dull life, homeschooled by her grandmother and only let out of the house under the supervision of a nanny. Much later, she discovers that she and her entire family are part of the Greek Pantheon, and that she's immortal. Her dreary childhood didn't just feel like forever, she'd been trapped as a child for centuries, and never noticed because she was kept away from other children.
35	* In Nick Harkaway's ''Literature/TheGoneAwayWorld'', a CrapsackWorld in which a super weapon poked big holes in the time-space continuum and which is held together by AppliedPhlebotinum, the narrator tells the story of himself and his best friend Gonzo and how the world came to be. About halfway through when the story shifts to present tense we find out that the narrator is Gonzo's imaginary friend who has been made flesh by an accident involving said phlebotinum.
36	* ''Literature/ForestKingdom'': Discussed in the ''Hawk & Fisher'' spinoff series' book 4 (''Wolf in the Fold''). After reading the papers that document the secret history of ''the freak'', the characters discover that it not only steals lifeforce, it takes the memories of its victims and believes it's actually them, for a while at least, with the very first victim of this being its own mother. After learning this, Hawk speculates that "the freak" has pulled a KillAndReplace on one of their host's guests (whose body had been found in the chimney), using a strong illusion spell to blend in, but because of the memory-stealing effect, doesn't realize they'd done so. Ultimately subverted when they're actually revealed, and it's shown that they knew who they were the whole time.
37	* ''Literature/{{Goosebumps}}'' was fond of this one.
38	** ''Literature/AShockerOnShockStreet'': A girl whose father is a theme park engineer has her and her best friend test out the ''Shock Street'' tramcar ride where terrifying things happen to them. Turns out they were robots built to test out the ride.
39	** You also have ''Literature/TheGhostNextDoor'', in which the girl suspects ghosts only to find out that she's the ghost.
40	** ''Literature/MyHairiestAdventure'': a kid starts growing hair after trying some instant-tanning lotion. He thinks there's something wrong with the lotion and he's turning into a dog as a result, but everyone insists the stuff is harmless. Turns out it is, he was born as a dog, and so were all the other kids in the town. The adults are involved in an experiment to turn dogs into people, but it's starting to wear off...
41	** Another book by the [[Creator/RLStine same author]] (though not part of the ''Goosebumps'' series, titled ''My Alien Parents'') involves a kid who is convinced that everyone he knows is being replaced with a duplicate, a la Film/InvasionOfTheBodySnatchers. Turns out at the end that he is a robot, and his memory chip is malfunctioning.
42	** In ''Literature/VampireBreath'', the protagonist finds out that the vampire he woke up is actually [[LukeIAmYourFather his grandfather]]. In the live-action adaptation, he and his sister even get fangs and coffins at the end of the episode.
43	** ''Literature/ILiveInYourBasement'', one of the last in the original series, tells the story of a boy who is stalked by a possessive, inhuman entity that lives in his basement. The end reveals that the monster is the narrator, dreaming that he was in the shoes of the kid upstairs.
44	** The short story ''The Werewolf's First Night'' features a boy being terrorized by a pack of werewolves. It turns out that they're really humans playing a mean prank on him...but he discovers he actually ''is'' one. He then uses this chance to get some revenge and chase them.
45	* ''Literature/HarryPotter'':
46	** In ''Literature/HarryPotterAndTheOrderOfThePhoenix'', Harry believes himself to be the tomato when he overhears members of the Order mutter something about him being possessed by Voldemort. As he'd just witnessed/felt like he'd actually attacked the father of his best friend, he is terrified of the possibility that he'd been the one attacking people. He wasn't.
47	** Throughout the series, Harry turns out to have some uncanny similarities to Voldemort, including speaking snake-language and their personal wands being "twins" by some bizarre coincidence. And even accounting for his "Boy who Lived" fame, the equally famous Dumbledore gives him an unusual amount of attention and special training. A prophecy states that "neither [Harry nor Voldemort] can die while the other survives," and Dumbledore is evasive about whether or not this means what it sounds like. The last book has the heroes hunting down and destroying Voldemort's {{Soul Jar}}s, and near the end they learn that Harry is one of them, created accidentally when Voldemort tried to kill him as a baby. His connection to Voldemort comes from literally possessing part of his soul. For Voldemort to die, Harry himself must die...presumably. But somehow, by baiting Voldemort into Killing-Cursing him ''again'', [[HoistByHisOwnPetard Harry makes Voldemort unknowingly destroy his own soul shard]], and Harry only has a brief case of OnlyMostlyDead.
48	* In ''Literature/ImThinkingOfEndingThings'', at the end of his dying dream, Jake (who had been imagining himself as his fake girlfriend up until this point) comes face to face with his true self, the depressed, lonely janitor, after being chased through the school. He finally recognizes it as himself and dies shortly after.
49	* Creator/PhilipKDick used this trope frequently as both a device and a premise. In the short story "Imposter", the protagonist searches for an android with a bomb inside it sent to Earth by hostile aliens, only to find that he himself is the android. The aliens included a failsafe trigger if he ''did'' realize he was the android, presumably to avoid CopiedTheMoralsToo.
50	* The first twist of ''Literature/ISitBehindTheEyes'' is that the Narrator of the story is not a little girl, as the readers were meant to believe, but the EldritchAbomination she suspected of possessing her. She is actually a disembodied soul performing a DemonicPossession on Emily. She was unaware of what she was because she was using Emily's mind at the time and had no memory of what she was like prior to the possession. The creature she suspected of possessing her was actually the real Emily trying to call for help. The second twist explains WHY she was possessing the little girl in the first place. Let's just say that everyone was glad when the Entity [[GrandTheftMe took over completely]].
51	* In the novel ''Literature/JohnDiesAtTheEnd'', while dealing with a conspiracy involving agents of a parallel universe, the protagonist/narrator David discovers self-incriminating evidence and catches a glance of what appears to be a dead body in his tool shed. He can't remember a half-hour or so of his day, while his gun is missing a single bullet. He also finds out about a young woman, Amy, who went missing around the same time. He immediately suspects he murdered her during a bout of temporary insanity, but while following clues, he discovers that she's alive and well, but can't remember anything from when she went missing. He later learns that those conspiratorial agents are in fact perfect clones that have replaced other people in the city. Over the course of a few days, he uncovers some very unsettling information, protects Amy from the forces of darkness, falls in love with her, travels to the parallel universe with his best friend John, and cripples the organization behind the invasion. When he finally takes a good look inside his tool shed, he discovers a corpse that looks exactly like himself. Assuming that this corpse was an intended replacement that he shot in self defense and blocked it out, he goes to reveal the identifying mark of the clones on the bottom of the body's foot. When the mark isn't where he expected to find it, Dave checks his own foot and learns that ''he'' is the clone, and personally killed the original Dave. At first, he's suicidal with guilt, but since he is completely indistinguishable from the real Dave in every way (aside from the mark on his foot that regular people can't see) and anything that would have controlled him is now dead, John and Amy manage to convince him to go on living his life as if nothing had happened. Except for his friend John occasionally calling him "Monster Dave" as a joke.
52	* Appears in Creator/HunterSThompson's seminal work ''[[https://grantland.com/features/looking-back-hunter-s-thompson-classic-story-kentucky-derby/ The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved]]'', wherein the main character and his foreign photographer search Kentucky during the annual horse race derby for the poster child of the decadence and depravity associated with the derby. In the end, after four or five days of madness, culture shocks and innumerable quantities of alcohol, his photographer exclaims: "It's us!"
53	* ''Literature/KillTheDead'', also by Creator/TanithLee, ends with the reveal that ghost-killer Parl Dro is, himself, a ghost.
54	* Creator/StephenKing probably has more than just the one, but an early story, "Strawberry Spring", (published in the collection ''Literature/NightShift''), has something like this happen to the narrator, who realizes he has a dissociative serial killer personality that only emerges during the fogs of titular "Strawberry" springs.
55	* Creator/HPLovecraft's horror works:
56	** One of the earliest examples is "Literature/TheOutsider1926", a first person point-of-view story that follows a mysterious lonely individual who cannot remember coming in contact with people. When he escapes his tower, he scares off the first people he sees and spots his reflection, revealing him to be -- ta-dah! -- undead.
57	** Lovecraft did this one again in the novella ''Literature/TheShadowOverInnsmouth,'' which ends with the protagonist discovering that he is one of the {{Half Human Hybrid}}s that are the titular TownWithADarkSecret's dark secret.
58	%%** And again in his story "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family".
59	* In ''Literature/MagicalGirlRaisingProject Restart'', the magical girl Keek has trapped numerous magical girls in a VR game designed to test their worthiness as magical girls because when they were tested to become magical girls, they were forced to participate in death games by their examiner, Cranberry. Keek believes that these Children of Cranberry are not fit to be magical girls as they would have picked up bad habits from their exam even if they were mind-wiped of the death game. If they cannot pass her game and die, that proves they were not worthy to be magical girls. She wants to extend these retests to all magical girls who were created by Cranberry and the magical girls inspired by Cranberry. Then Snow White gives her proof that Keek's examiner (who Keek has been mind-wiped of) had conducted death games inspired by Cranberry as well, making Keek herself one of the magical girls she finds unacceptable. This contradiction shatters her and causes Keek to disappear inside her own virtual world.
60	* A rare happy example of this trope: throughout Terry Brooks' ''Literature/MagicKingdomForSaleSold'', Ben Holiday spends the novel trying to find a way to summon the Paladin, the invincible champion of the kings of Landover, only to discover when he is finally successful that he himself is the Paladin.
61	* In the ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' short story collection ''Shadowmoor'', one of the stories is "Meme's Tale", in which the titular heroine is forced to flee her goblin family, and has no idea why they exiled her until she glimpses her reflection in a pool and sees that she's an elf.
62	* In the Creator/OHenry story "A Man About Town", the protagonist is obsessed with learning more about people, particularly stereotypes like the titular "Man About Town". He questions people, including a learned friend. His obsession causes him enough travel and tunnel vision that he has a traffic accident. In the hospital, he reads a newspaper article about his accident where the victim is described as a "typical man about town."
63	* In the Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse Tie-In ''[[Literature/BlackWidow Forever Red]]'', Alex Manor seems like an OrdinaryHighSchoolStudent who constantly gets into fights because he has a low tolerance for bullying. Then one day he meets a girl named Ava who knows everything about him even though they've never met before. A short while later he and Ava are being pursued by Russian mercenaries, only to be rescued by the famed superhero and secret agent [[ComicBook/BlackWidow Natasha Romanov]]. He soon finds out that he's able to speak perfect Russian despite never having learned the language before, and he suddenly begins displaying enhanced skill in hand to hand combat despite never taking any martial arts classes. Then it turns out that Black Widow has been spying on him for the last 2 years. It turns out that he's really Alexei Romanov, Black Widow's younger brother who she placed in WitnessProtection with FakeMemories to protect him from her EvilMentor Ivan Somodorov.
64	* ''Literature/{{MARZENA}}'': Lauren Hackenhoek is just your everyday ordinary American girl dreaming of one day becoming a doctor. Then the day comes when she becomes a neurosurgeon, and then a tragic accident occurs: one of her patients becomes a mass murderer. Lauren loses everything, she ends up on the streets, then somebody picks her up and offers her a good job with a good pay. The work? Doing consultation for a Private Intelligence Company. Everything is going great, except for her own medical examination. Lauren has something weird inside her head, her brain is full of microsurgical scars. That's because Lauren is actually a body double of the real Lauren made by MagicPlasticSurgery. Her memories of who she is are all an artificial construct from dream and drug therapies.
65	* The young adult series ''Literature/{{Mindwarp}}'' has one of these. The kids at the core of the series, teenagers with superpowers who're hunted by alien shapeshifters, often make reference to Todd, a kid who vanished from their small town before they started coming into their powers. Come book 5, Todd shows up back in town; to him, there was a bright light one night, and he returned several months later with no knowledge of the intervening period. Surprise -- he's actually an alien shapeshifter on very, ''very'' deep cover trying to flush the kids out. He defies his programming, however, and disguising himself as one of the other kids so the aliens take him instead. The trope is also played with every kid in the series. They're part aliens too.
66	* Done in a ''Series/SesameStreet'' book, of all places! ''Literature/TheMonsterAtTheEndOfThisBook'' has Grover being terrified of the title character and pleading with the reader not to reach the end of the book and reaching the monster. HilarityEnsues as Grover tries increasingly drastic measures to prevent the reader from reaching the end of the book. When the reader finally reaches the end, Grover thinks he's doomed... but then he realizes that ''he'' is the monster at the end of the book. Go figure.
67	* In Creator/NeilGaiman's novella "Murder Mysteries", the main character turns out to be a dissociative serial killer who doesn't remember his crimes, or that anything is wrong at all, until after he's told about a murder investigation that happened in heaven prior to the creation of the universe, by an old man who may or may not have been the Archangel Raguel, whose function is to serve as the Vengeance of the Lord.
68	* Creator/VCAndrews' ''Literature/MySweetAudrina'' is about Audrina Adare, a little girl who was born exactly nine years after her older sister, also named Audrina (or the First and Best Audrina), was gang-raped and murdered. Audrina also has trouble keeping track of time and has no memories of her early life, and her father keeps telling her that she needs to absorb the First and Best Audrina's gifts and memories. At the end of the book, it is revealed that there ''was'' no First and Best Audrina. Her father wanted her back to the way she was before the rape, and used shock therapy on her, along with other things.
69	* In the BittersweetEnding of ''Literature/{{Night}}'', Elie Wiesel (or an AuthorAvatar of him) is liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp at the cost of losing his family. When he finally gets home, he looks at himself in a mirror and sees the full extent of what UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust has done to him. He describes himself as nothing more but a corpse.
70	* {{Subverted\|Trope}} and {{parodied\|Trope}} in Lavie Tidhar's novel ''Osama''. The GenreSavvy reader has suspected all along that the protagonist is an AlternateUniverse version of UsefulNotes/OsamaBinLaden. Near the end, he sees a portrait of Osama bin Laden that looks exactly like a bearded version of him, but then discovers that it's actually a mirror... with a false beard attached.
71	* In the Creator/GeneWolfe's ''Literature/TheOtherDeadMan'' the protagonist fights off CameBackWrong crewmates. Then he is shown a mirror...
72	* In ''Literature/{{Otherland}}'', one of the many characters you follow is Paul Jonas, a man who has lost his memories. He picks up bits and pieces over the first three books, but in the last one finally discovers not only his past, but that he is a digital clone of the real Paul Jonas.
73	* ''Literature/{{Pact}}'' follows Blake Thorburn and his DistaffCounterpart Rose Thorburn, who is an artificially created vestige trapped in a mirror world. After Blake [[RetGone has his connections to the world eaten by a demon]], however, Rose steps into the real world, assuming his place amidst his family and friends. Blake eventually realizes that this means that he, not Rose, is artificial, created so that Rose, protected in her mirror world, would have someone to take the blows for her as she was initiated into the secret family practices, and that correspondingly everything about his past was calculated in order to make him [[HatesBeingTouched avoid physical contact]], which made him decay, while simultaneously being [[TheIdealist someone that would do everything in his power to help Rose]], a family member trapped in a terrible situation. We get another reveal when it turns out that neither is truly the original. They were created by a demon splitting an original Ross/Rose Thorburn in half, with the original's traits being selectively divided between the two.
74	* In ''Literature/{{Parasitology}}'', the main character, Sal, is a tapeworm who has taken control of her host's body. An astute reader will figure this out considerably faster than Sal does, though to be fair to her, she hasn't read the blurb.
75	* In the short story "Quest" by Lee Harding, an old man is searching for something non-artificial on Earth out of nostalgia. At the end, when he discovers that there is nothing left and the police are coming to arrest him, he tries to commit suicide to prove that he, at least, is not artificial. He is.
76	* {{Subverted\|Trope}} in Rog Phillips' "Literature/{{Rat in the Skull}}", in which a laboratory rat unwittingly lives its whole life hooked up in the pilot's seat of a MobileSuitHuman. When some teenage boys stumble upon the inert robot and remove the sleeping rat, the narration muses upon how traumatic it would have been for "Adam" to discover its real nature... except the psychologists conducting the experiment never allowed their test subject to learn what a rat ''is'', so the poor thing's perplexity remains complete to the end.
77	* Creator/LordDunsany's short story "The Return", in which the narrator -- who promises a real ghost story -- only discovers at the end that he is the ghost. (Also broadcast as a radio play.)
78	* This appears a lot in the ''Literature/RevelationSpaceSeries''. ''Chasm City'' offers a particularly convoluted example: Our lovable hero Tanner is actually the war criminal Cahuella, after stealing Tanner's identity and buying into his own cover. Cahuella experiences flashbacks of the life and times of the near-mythological psychopath Sky Haussmann and believes them to be the result of the indoctrinal virus he is infected with. Actually, he is Sky Haussman.
79	* ''Literature/{{Sabella}}'' by Creator/TanithLee ends with the reveal that she and the main male character are both native Martian copies of human children who died in a certain underground cave.
80	%%* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvbjR3ZAulQ "Something Was Wrong"]] from the second book of the ''Literature/ScaryStoriesToTellInTheDark'' series.
81	* ''Literature/TheScholomance'': {{Deuteragonist}} and resident mal-slayer Orion Lake is a wizard/maw-mouth hybrid created from his mother's experiments. In a more literal example than most, he only realizes this when he sees another maw-mouth for the first time and recognizes it has [[HorrorHunger the same, bone-deep hunger]] he's felt all his life.
82	* The Franchise/SherlockHolmes spin-off novel ''Master of Lies'' by Philip Purser-Hallard features a case where the book ''itself'' is basically an example of this. Most of the book depicts Holmes and Watson investigating a series of counterfeiting cases that Holmes eventually determines were organised by his own brother Mycroft to fund some of his intelligence activities, events reaching a point where Watson appears genuinely afraid that Holmes is capable of beating minor criminals to death and may be willing to turn on Watson himself. However, the last quarter of the novel reveals that what the reader has been reading so far is actually a manuscript written by the counterfeiters Holmes and Watson are tracking; their plan was to leave the manuscript in Baker Street after killing Watson and planting evidence that Sherlock Holmes had his friend killed to protect his brother. Looking back over the previous pages, Holmes, Watson, and their police contact Stanley Hopkins note various moments where events are depicted relatively accurately (most often those scenes where Hopkins was present, suggesting that he was intended to be the one to find the manuscript after Watson's death) and other scenes that either change what was said or are outright fictitious, such as meetings Watson had with men who are later revealed to be part of the forgery gang they are tracking where he shared far more personal details about Holmes that he would never have done in reality.
83	* ''Literature/ShutterIsland''. Teddy Daniels is Andrew Laeddis, who killed his wife after she drowned their children. He has been searching for Laeddis throughout the novel only to find that he IS Laeddis under a horrible delusion. Maybe.
84	* In ''Literature/SoImASpiderSoWhat'' Shiraori discovers that the gaps and inaccuracies in her memories are due to her originally being an ordinary ''house spider'' in Japan. When she was killed and reincarnated like the class, [[JerkassGods D]] attached a piece of her soul and a lazily modified set of memories to the spider so it could act as a ''decoy'' while D slacked off. She was never expected to survive past a few years.
85	* This is the plot of the ''Literature/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineRelaunch'' novel ''Fearful Symmetry'', told first from Captain Kira's perspective, then from that of her double, Iliana Ghemor, a Cardassian sleeper agent altered to look like Kira and remember being her. In the novel, Ghemor is the tomato; in the ''Deep Space Nine'' episode it was a sequel to, the tomato was not Kira.
86	* ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'':
87	** The ''Literature/GalaxyOfFear'' book ''Clones'' features, you guessed it, clones. Possibly subverted. Tash Arranda flees a horde of evil clones of herself and her brother, sheds her own clothes and dons one of the jumpsuits they're wearing, and hits her head so the past few minutes are blurred together and confusing. She finds a defective Tash-clone that thinks she is the real girl and the others are after her. Since they seem to have her memories, Tash freaks and wonders for a while if ''she'' isn't a defective clone herself. Soon enough she decides she's not. For one, only she has the necklace her mother gave her. For two...
88	--->Tash remembered the two clones of herself that she'd met. Both had known everything she had known. But they were still different from her. One had been angry, almost [[EvilTwin evil]]. The other had appeared frightened and defeated. The real Tash had been bothered by the sense of the dark side, but the first clone must have been totally absorbed by it. Later, Tash had been frightened by the army of clones, but the second clone had been petrified.\
89	So they weren't ''exactly'' like her. They couldn't have the same feelings. They hadn't had the same experiences, just memories of those experiences. The feelings attached to them were absent.
90	** Played straighter in an earlier book, ''City of the Dead''. In that book, injecting a corpse with a certain serum and exposing them to boneworm slime caused them to rise as a zombie. The MadScientist looking into this also found that [[ProfessorGuineaPig injecting himself]] with the serum before he died, and then getting bonewormed after death, made him come BackFromTheDead as a zombie with all his memories and facilities intact, though he did tend to twitch. Then, trying to eliminate the twitch, he injected Zak Arranda with the serum, poisoned him into a coma so deep he was declared dead and BuriedAlive, and therefore had him exposed to boneworms. Later Zak categorically denied that he was now a zombie, since he was still alive and actually had never died, and he doesn't have the SuperStrength of [[OurZombiesAreDifferent these zombies]]...but he does twitch a little at the end of the book. Maybe this means that he'll come back after he actually does die.
91	* Creator/TedDekker's Christian suspense novel (and later movie) ''Literature/{{Thr3e}}'' is about a young man tormented by a serial killer that decides to make him his next victim. He's aided by an old childhood friend and an FBI agent whose brother was one of the victims. It later turns out that both the "killer" and the childhood friend are alternate personalities of the main character, caused by [[FreudianExcuse the abuse his adoptive mother put him through as a child]]. In fact, the "evil" side of his personality isn't the same serial killer that killed the agent's brother at all--the main character heard about the murders and his other personality started to copy them.
92	%% ** This is also the plot of Sidney Sheldon's ''Tell Me Your Dreams'' and several other books and movies.
93	* ''Literature/ThursdayNext'': Goliath, the evil corporation, replaces people with synthetic versions on such a regular basis that the GenreSavvy characters check themselves frequently to make sure they're still...them.
94	* In "Literature/TheTownWhereNoOneGotOff", by Creator/RayBradbury, has a protagonist that is [[IllKillYou suddenly threatened by an old man]], so he reveals that he was planning on killing someone in this town, which surprises the protagonist, too.
95	* In Creator/FrederikPohl's science fiction "The Tunnel Under the World" the main character becomes convinced that some sinister conspiracy is keeping the citizens of his town stuck in a GroundhogDayLoop by erasing their memories every night. He eventually learns that he and everyone else in the town were killed in an explosion, and their consciousnesses have been installed into tiny androids in a scale model town where they repeat their final day over and over while researchers use them to test the effectiveness of advertising jingles and political slogans.
96	* ''Literature/UkiahOregon''[='s=] realization that he's an alien (actually a HalfHumanHybrid, but he doesn't know that yet) is rather traumatic for him, especially since he now has to explain this to his brand-new girlfriend.
97	* In the original book version of ''Literature/UpInTheAir'', Ryan Bingham notices strange charges on his credit card and frequent flyer miles and suspects identity theft. At the end, it's implied he is responsible for these charges, as he's suffering from blackouts and memory loss.
98	* In the story "To Mars and Providence", published in the anthology novel ''Literature/WarOfTheWorldsGlobalDispatches'', this happens to Lovecraft himself; he discovers he's actually one of the elder gods whose eventual return forced the Martians to flee their homeplanet and invade Earth.
99	* The urban fantasy book ''Literature/WhiteApples'' by Jonathan Carroll has an enemy mook who is ordered to a barbershop to meet the ''King of the Park'', a notoriously dangerous bad guy. As he enters the barbershop, he is terrified, desperately trying to figure out which of the people present is this nasty character, until it is revealed that the King of the Park is not a single person, but a series of people who have been given his power; the people in the barbershop are there to transform ''him'' into the King of the Park, until the end of his mission.
100	* OlderThanRadio: Used in the 1839 Creator/EdgarAllanPoe short story "Literature/WilliamWilson", wherein the titular VillainProtagonist discovers that the mysterious doppelganger that has been constantly foiling his schemes is himself, or rather the personification of his conscience.
101	* In ''Wonderland'' by Joanna Nadin, what was designed as a clever plot twist was actually made pretty obvious to the readers. The main character begins about to kill herself and her best friend, encouraged by that friend. Then the story is told in flashback and she realises she IS her best friend. She has Dissociative Identity Disorder, apparently. Many readers called it, especially since NO ONE else interacted with the friend, and the main character hid all reasons why she went to see her, and so the plot twist was no longer there.
102	* In ''Literature/WorldEndWhatDoYouDoAtTheEndOfTheWorldAreYouBusyWillYouSaveUs'' humanity, with the exception of the main character, went extinct following the emergence of the [[EldritchAbomination 17 Beasts]]. As it turns out the Beasts didn’t wipe out humanity; they were humanity. The Beasts were actually the original lifeforms inhabiting the planet, who ended up getting forcibly uplifted into human form by the extraterrestrial Visitors. The apocalypse that destroyed all life on the surface was a result of the "curse" that the Visitors placed on humanity failing due to overpopulation, causing them to revert back to their original state.
103	* A variant of this trope occurs in the ''Literature/WorldWarZ'' supplement "Closure, Ltd". The interviewer is given what appears to be a tour of the titular organization, which provides [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin closure for customers]] by dressing up a zombie to look like a loved one and kill it. The interviewee goes at great length to explain the detail they take, flat-out explaining that his customers generally know that the end-product isn't ''really'' their reanimated loved one, but the need for closure is so great that they don't care. It's hinted at the end that the Interviewer isn't really an interviewer: he's a customer, and at the end, he shoots the zombie they dressed up for him.
104	%%* J. G. Ballard was also fond of this device, and employed it in his 1960 story "Zone of Terror."
105

Context TomatoInTheMirror / Literature