More handpicked essays just for you.
Dr jekyll and mr hyde critical essay
Dr jekyll and mr hyde critical essay
Dr jekyll and mr hyde critical essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
The devil is inside all of us, but the choice is yours: will he overpower you or will you overpower him? In the end we all regret the bad choices we make, so we all have to be careful no matter what we do. The novel “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” written by Robert Louis Stevenson, portrays the regret and guilt we all face, caused by the evil within ourselves. Dr. Jekyll thought he was a good person, but he created this monster-of-a-man that overpowered his own body. Eventually all the bad things he did amounted and he wished he had never done it. Dr. Jekyll shouldn’t have let his guilt win due to his choice of killing himself. No matter what he did to try and forget that he was also Mr. Hyde he couldn’t, but after all that happened,
Every human is faced with a decision every second of the day, from the moment they wake up, to when they finally drift off to sleep, and every moment in between. For some the choice between doing good and doing bad is obvious, for others the choice might not be so clear. There are always obstacles that can make the choice hard, be it peer pressure or pressure that people put on themselves to be something different; the option to do the wrong thing is always hanging in front of them. Robert Louis Stevenson represents the archetypal theme of this idea in multiple ways in the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. During the Victorian Era, in which the story is set, there was a largely agreed upon fact that there was a certain way
As Jekyll reached adult hood, he found himself living a dual life. He had become more curious in discovering his other side. Jekyll insists, “Man is not truly one, but truly two” (125). This eventually led Jekyll into the scientific interests of separating his good and evil side, and he finds a chemical concoction that transforms him into a more wicked man, Edward Hyde. At first, Hyde was of pure impulse, but in the end, he became dominate and took control over Jekyll. Jekyll had never intended to hurt anyone, but he was aware that something could potentially go wrong. Jekyll presumes, “I knew well that I risked death, for any drug that so potently shook the very fortress of identity… utterly blot that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change” (127-129). One could say this makes Jekyll equally as menacing as Hyde. Jekyll couldn’t control the imbalance between the two natures. Jekyll foolishly allowed his evil side to flourish and become stronger. This is shown when Jekyll has awoken to find that he has turned into Hyde without taking the solution. Jekyll says, “But the hand in which I now saw, clearly enough in the yellow light of a mid- London morning…It was the hand of Edward Hyde” (139).
Jekyll. Hyde commits acts of murder and assault yet can be seen as Dr. Jekyll’s id or deep desires. By trying to separate good and bad . Dr. Jekyll passed scientific and social borders to isolate his personality. In doing so, he lost control of who he wanted to be. As a last resort he created a poisonous potion that Hyde drank and died through act of suicide. Dr. Jekyll although not working with anyone took matters in his own hands which makes him seem like an outlaw hero. He did not turn himself into the police when he had control. However, Dr. Jekyll seems to have qualities of a official hero in his maturity in handling the situation. He knows how evil his alter ego is, so he isolates himself from others as a safety precaution. Jekyll tries to live a normal life, but is unable to. His status as a well distinguished doctor and sociability skills with his
Jekyll does deserve his final miserable fate because he commits several selfish deeds to the point where he brings his miserable fate upon himself. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson uses Jekyll to represent how man prioritizes by putting himself over others. Throughout the book, Jekyll’s two different sides are used to show that man is consistently selfish and will usually think of himself before others. Even though Jekyll has a good side and an evil side, both sides of him are selfish. Jekyll originally takes the potion for selfish reasons, Jekyll uses Hyde to conquer his own evil temptations, and in the end Jekyll gives into Hyde and completely gives up.
Jekyll unveils his story, it becomes evident that Dr. Jekyll’s efforts to keep Mr. Hyde, his immoral outlet, reticent are in vain. Dr. Jekyll succumbs to Mr. Hyde once and eventually the pull of his worse self overpowers Dr. Jekyll completely. His futile attempts to contain Mr. Hyde were more damaging than auspicious, as Mr. Hyde would only gain a stronger grip on Dr. Jekyll. Dr. Jekyll writes, “I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught… My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring” (115). Dr. Jekyll’s inevitable passion for debauchery is only further invigorated by his repression of Mr. Hyde. By restraining a desire that is so deeply rooted within Dr. Jekyll, he destroys himself, even after his desires are appeased. Like a drug, when Dr. Jekyll first allowed himself to concede to Mr. Hyde, he is no longer able to abstain, as his initial submission to depravity resulted in the loss of Dr. Jekyll and the reign of Mr.
Jekyll was a lower class citizen, like Mr. Hyde. Unlike Jekyll, Hyde has the sole privilege of being dismissed and unnoticed because he is of a lower class. According to Martin Danahay, author of “Dr. Jekyll’s Two Bodies”, Jekyll wears the body of Hyde “as if Mr. Hyde were a pair of pajamas that he would wear while sleeping in one location, but not the other” (23). Essentially, he could take a nap as Jekyll, wake up as Hyde, and spend the evening in opium den after opium den, experiencing different forbidden pleasures other than sodomy. Dr. Jekyll enjoys his new found freedom through Hyde at first, but soon grows weary of it when Mr. Hyde takes over whenever he wants. As Hyde grows into more power, he becomes reckless and starts leaving messes for Jekyll to clean up. More messes means a greater chance of being exposed, and having his gentlemanly reputation ruined. It makes sense as to why Dr. Jekyll kills himself and Hyde in the end. According to Sanna, Jekyll is “no longer able to revert to his good and distinguished aspect and personality” and commits suicide to avoid social condemnation (36). Jekyll kills himself because he can no longer control Hyde’s lust for wickedness, and he is tired of trying to keep up the appearance of someone he is not in a society where men having a need for certain pleasures is frowned upon. And, because Jekyll cannot control his need for these pleasures, he would rather die than be made a fool
Jekyll started out stronger than Hyde, but the longer he stayed Hyde, the more he enjoyed what he was doing as Hyde. This shows how humans will indulge in sins even if it meant eternal damnation.
Dr. Jekyll was responsible for the murder and death of Dr. Hyde because he was still “there” enough take the poison and sacrifice himself to end it all. The text shows that Jekyll kept trying to fix what he had done, and felt very ashamed of Hyde’s actions. This proves that Dr. Jekyll is responsible for the death of Mr. Hyde, because if he hadn’t still been “there,” while being in the form of Hyde, he would not have remembered the evil acts of Hyde. He also tried to fix his mistakes, but still didn’t stop when he had
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the reader is left with the notion that Jekyll tries to stop himself from becoming Hyde, but surrenders when he realizes that fixing the situation is out of his hands. It cannot be said that Jekyll is completely innocent, for if he truly understood the concept of consequences, his fate could be in his own hands. This is not the case because Jekyll doesn’t want to control Hyde. He lives a pleasurable and exciting life vicariously through him, which is something he is not willing to give up. It also seems that as Jekyll transforms into Hyde, he also undergoes a change in conscience. With this separation he somehow rationalizes that Hyde’s actions aren’t his own, and his good qualities can remain unimpaired. Jekyll “even [makes] haste, where it [is] possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde” (74). Eventually the boundary between Jekyll and Hyde becomes a blur, which is a sign that the balance of good and evil is becoming unstable within him. Jekyll’s curiosity and yearning for an unknown pleasure causes his character to shift from only good to only bad. His conscience, once again, is completely off balance. The essential thing to learn is that a balance of the light and dark aspects in your life is necessary to live not only an honest life like Dr. Jekyll, but also a life with pleasure like that of Mr.
“Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences,” (Robert Louis Stevenson). There are consequences for all poor action. We must all eventually take responsibility for the errors we make in our personal lives, and in the lives of others. The story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is well known for its take on duality, and multiple personality disorders. The main character Dr. Jekyll, desired to split himself into two different sides, his good side, Jekyll, and his bad side, Hyde. The experiment is successful primarily, but as time stretches, so does the extremity of Hyde’s power over Jekyll. When Jekyll comes to realize his misconception of Hyde’s purpose, he must ultimately attempt to end Hyde’s life, but in order to do this, he
Henry Jekyll’s innermost vices, but since he held himself to an extremely high standard of moral excellence, he needed to find another way of releasing. He creates Hyde as his way of getting these primal urges out. During this time period, the focus on reputation and credibility was huge, and this is how men were judged. He had many urges that he was internally repressing, as a result of existing in the Victorian era, which was well known for how incredibly stuffy and repressed it was. Jekyll was widely respected in the community as a doctor and he had many friends, so it is understandable that he didn’t want to lose his reputation, which came first for men of his social standing in this time period. He went to great lengths to create and cover for Hyde, including renting a place for Hyde to live, and making a bank account for his alter ego. The creation of Hyde turns out to be way more sinister than Jekyll initially imagined. Hyde’s own name is a pun, as he is the part of Jekyll that he must keep hidden away for fear of
Due to their concealed yet present inner evil, humans are naturally inclined to sin but at the same time resist temptation because of influence from society, thus illustrating a duality in humanity. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde focuses on how humans are actually two different people composed into one. The concept of dual human nature includes all of Hyde’s crimes and ultimately the death of Jekyll. Jekyll proposes that “man is not truly one, but truly two,” and describes the human soul as a constant clash of the “angel” and the “fiend,” each struggling to suppress the other (Stevenson 61, 65). Man will try to cover up his inner evil because once it rises to the surface everyone will know the real...
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a little different then Frankenstein in a way that the monster isn’t identified as a monster as much for his appearance as he is for his actions. Dr. Jekyll was a scientist and as a scientist he had to keep and good name but he didn’t want to be good he want to be bad. So, he decided he would have two personalities. Thinking that if he had two personalities he could be good and evil. He made a potion that transforms himself into a man without a conscience. So, He could do all those bad things that he wanted to do but then had a way to cover it up by saying it was someone else. But, eventually this plan got out of hand yes, he had two personalities of Dr. Jekyll being the good doctor and then Mr. Hyde being the murder, but he started no being able to control when he was Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. He fears that he will turn into Jekyll permanently. Society doesn’t except this because your not supposed to be two different people. Trying to be two different people is monstrous because that just doesn’t happen and him to think that is okay is monstrous. Also, for him to murder people makes him a monster. By Dr. Jekyll’s friend starting to get suspicious about this situation drive Dr. Jekyll to worry then, he turns back to Mr. Hyde and thinks it’s a good idea to kill himself. So, society drove his monstrosity to kill himself, which made him to continue to be a
Dr. Jekyll did the unthinkable in the fictional novel Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as he had separated his bad side from his good side into two different people. However his experiment never completely worked and so his the two people that he had created left him in agony going back and forth between the two. The lesson that we learned from Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is that no good can come out of indulging into your maleficence. To begin, Dr. Jekyll showed us that being one hundred percent horrible can lead you down a path of abhorrent things with no conscience. In the beginning of the book as Mr. Richard Enfield had explained the “Story of The Door,” when a man, that man being Dr. Jekyll’s evil side Hyde, had tried killing a girl as he “trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground” (9).
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde believes that the focus should be less on Jekyll’s state on mind, but rather his growing addiction that is present in the novel. Daniel Wright is one such scholar who believes that ignoring the addiction aspect of the novel is to look at the novella in a light that is much more simplistic than Stevenson intended. “The reduction of Jekyll’s character to one of simple duality, however, is to oversimplify and misapprehend the enormity of the psychological affliction of Stevenson’s tortured physician, for Dr. Jekyll is not so much a man of conflicted personality as a man suffering from the ravages of addiction” (Wright). Wright claims that the novel is not focusing so much on the good and evil that exists in man, as it is the addiction that can corrupt and drive any sane man to do immoral things. “In any case, to assume that Jekyll represents human ‘good’ while Hyde embodies that which is ‘evil’ is to forget that Hyde is but the consequence of Jekyll’s experiments in forbidden science; he exists only by the will of Jekyll; he has no independent being.