Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Essay by review • February 14, 2011 • Essay • 534 Words (3 Pages) • 1,714 Views
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a novel which is all about a mans good side (Dr Jekyll) and bad side (Mr. Hyde). This novel shows us that how a nice person just transforms into an evil person. Mr. Hyde was Dr. Jekyll's strange, divided, twin of a self. Hyde is of course a murderer, and this status causes Jekyll to commit suicide to 'kill' Hyde, before his evil self is convicted for the publicly humiliating crime or goes out to kill again.
The novel begins when a lawyer, named Utterton, hears a young woman being flattened by an evil stranger named Dr. Hyde. To pay off the girl's parents, the man Hyde gives a check with the name of a respectable gentleman across the front. Dr. Jekyll has willed all of this money to this man but why? Only clue is when Dr. Jekyll's divided colleague, Lanyon, makes unclear claims against his former friend and medical professional, saying that Jekyll is involved in ridiculous and dangerous experiments that have to do with the human soul and personality.
Then, perhaps a better way of discussing the novel is to say, why he become Mr. Hyde? Is that what he wanted? Of course not. His idea was just to be perfect but by this experiment drained himself of all of his necessary strength as a scientist and created a monster by himself, a creature who stalks the streets at night, lingers with women of ill repute and low class, and lives out all of Dr. Jekyll's deepest desires and socially unacceptable dreams. In other words, through the act of self-repression, Dr. Jekyll destroys himself, and creates more misery for the other people in his life.
The novel's literary structure also underlines the idea that all human selves are divided between good and bad, just as much as the plot. Rather than the narrator having majority, the narrator is a relatively restrained, third person voice. The lawyerly and moral voice of Utterton controls, alternating with letters from Jekyll. Then, finally, in the last two chapters of the book, the dominant voice of Lanyon and Jekyll both recount the scientific truth of what has happened from their different viewpoints. Again, this highlights the duality of view and the human consciousness.
Only when Lanyon actually sees Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde's mutual transformations does the reader truly have a fully realistic explanation, with no other possible alternatives to explain why Dr. Jekyll
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