The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Rlstevenson Book Review
Foreign Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Recommended Ages: 12+
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The title of this volume varies from one edition to some other. Sometimes it is published with a "The" at the beginning. Sometimes "Strange Instance of" is omitted. Sometimes it is even given simply as Jekyll & Hyde. It's not as though the printer needs to save ink; it's a very short volume, a novella really. There are even more than versions of Stevenson's story than variants of its title. Next to A Christmas Carol, it has probably seen more adaptations for stage and picture than any other piece of work of English literature, including parodies and re-imaginings that (ha, ha) transform the original story almost out of recognition. I take seen and read several of these re-tellings, which share little in common except the essential concept of a man who, by taking a potion, transforms himself into another person—in most versions, an identity compounded of all the dark, evil parts of himself. And of course, the trouble that bad Mr. (or Ms.) Hyde gets into, e'er complicates things for Dr. Jekyll besides.
What I never realized until now, on finally reading the story as Stevenson wrote information technology, is how different his novella is from any and all of the dramatizations, abridgements, contextualizations, and "for dummies" versions on the market. The popular idea of what this story is almost is too quite out of order. It isn't about split personalities or "dissociative identity disorder." It is about a human being's struggle with the conflicting powers of good and evil within his one personality, and the tragedy that takes identify when he experiments with a drug to separate the two. Information technology is a story about the form of a life-destroying addiction, together with a homo's losing struggle confronting moral abuse, guilt, and the terror of justice. Information technology is a true tale of horror. It resembles nightmares I take had and—assuming that I'm not alone in this—explores something that troubles many people with a well-developed moral conscience and an agreement of the evil nature within each of u.s.. And it does this in a story that combines stupor, suspense, mystery, and a really spooky concluding confession, as merely a master writer tin. Here is a sample of the story you thought yous knew, in case you've never read it:
This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous grit gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life.
When I started reading this story, I thought the quote I was going to drop into my review was going to be, "'If he be Mr Hyde,' he had idea, 'I shall exist Mr Seek.'" At first it doesn't seem to have the Jekyll/Hyde mythology equally seriously every bit it ought to, judging from more than recent redactions. Pretending that we don't know what the story hasn't openly revealed to us (though we do know, we do), we don't detect out what'due south upwards with Jekyll and Hyde until almost the terminate of the story. We come at the truth slowly, through the investigations of a lawyer friend of Henry Jekyll's, named Gabriel Utterson.
Lawyer Utterson knows something fishy is going on between the skillful physician and his bad protege. He worries that, by making his volition in favor of the violent and amoral Edward Hyde, Jekyll puts himself in harm'due south mode. Only Jekyll tells him non to worry. Then Hyde is seen committing a notorious murder, and worrying is dorsum on the menu. But the mystery only grows more perplexing every bit Hyde disappears and as Jekyll, after a season of unusually sociable behavior, suddenly goes into strict seclusion. A mutual friend of Jekyll and Utterson's, a physician named Lanyon, suddenly suffers a physical and mental breakdown and dies within weeks, leaving Utterson a sealed letter to be read merely on the decease or disappearance of Jekyll. The crunch finally comes when Jekyll's servants appeal to the lawyer for help, suspecting that Hyde has done away with Jekyll. They break down the door of the pharmacist's laboratory and brand the kind of ghastly discovery that can only be understood afterward reading the final testament of both Lanyon and Jekyll. And the arctic deepens the farther you read, all the way down to the bone.
This isn't almost a man innocently, accidentally, and (at showtime) uncontrollably being dissever into two persons, one good and the other evil, and and so having problem keeping his double life from being detected. It is, rather, most a human being who struggles with the spiritual duality within himself. He thinks he can create ii persons out of 1, and split the bad from the skilful; simply when he tries it, he discovers that he was wrong. The Jekyll part of him remains as he was before, with both the proficient and bad held in constant tension; the Hyde side, even so, is deformed, stunted, and purely evil. Because of this imbalance in favor of evil, and the weakness of Jekyll'southward homo nature, and the wicked abandon of Hyde, and the decreasing effectiveness of the drug, all working together, what starts as a weird experiment quickly becomes an habit. And while Jekyll increasingly loses control, Hyde has become a hunted man, doomed to the gallows if captured.
Any civilized and decent person must be able to imagine and sympathize with the horror a man feels every bit he sees himself becoming a monster, and knows that his identity will before long be lost. The height horror fetishes of the moment—zombies, vampires, and werewolves—can also be understood in the light of losing yourself and condign something monstrous. Only Dr. Jekyll'due south situation is, if anything, even more than cruel: he has, at to the lowest degree to outset with, the ability to come up back to himself at will. Just through his own weakness, errors, and the biochemistry of habit, he lives through the desperation of losing that saving grace, bit by tiny bit. And all the while, he knows that he brought it on himself by selection; nothing flake him or scratched him to brand him this way. This is what he chose, rather than having to struggle betwixt his high aspirations and his low appetites. Information technology's an instructive horror, and then, for the rest of us who sometimes feel discouraged as we fight our own inner demons. But it's as well a horrible horror, and no mistake. I, for one, volition have something new to pray nearly tonight, after finishing this volume. I might as well pray anyway, since I'll be lying awake!
Source: https://blog.mugglenet.com/2013/09/book-review-dr-jekyll-mr-hyde/
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