Similarities Between Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde

The conflict of good versus evil is a universal conflict that will forever be apart of literature. The next big thing happens to be the struggle between internal conflict and outside opposing conflict. The poem Beowulf and the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson has proven that both of these shape the events of these stories.

In Beowulf, the struggle of the character is an outside opposing conflict. The reason for being so is because the enemy he is facing only stops Beowulf. He faces no fear, nor does he hesitate to help the people who witnessed the horror killing that Grendel put upon the village. The moral of Beowulf is to have courage, bravery and be honorary. Beowulf wouldn’t be able to express those if he was also battling himself on the inside.

While Beowulf is an external cause, Jekyll and Hyde is quite the opposite.

Jekyll created this potion in which he switches to another person, Mr. Hyde. This experiment ended up going horribly wrong because Mr. Hyde would start randomly coming out and taking over Dr. Jekyll. Since Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are apart of the same body, it is an internal conflict. Nothing from the outside world shapes how Jekyll changes to Hyde. It is a deal where Jekyll is battling against Mr. Hyde and eventually just trying to contain him from coming out.

While internal and external conflict plays a major role in these two stories, the battle between good and evil is the main struggle in the books. In Beowulf, Grendel and is family just come from a dark place. Grendel is like the “ captain of evil” and has no sympathy and is very unforgiving (Beowulf 744). On the other hand, Beowulf is the good guy. He sailed across an ocean to help people in need. Beowulf put his life on the line to protect the people and had no problem when he “brought down the hell-brute” (Beowulf

1269).
When talking about good versus evil, it goes without saying that Jekyll and Hyde is the go to novella. Jekyll is a good genuine guy who is pretty well liked. He even goes on Sunday walks and does not mind being out in the open in front of people. Aside from Jekyll, Mr. Hyde is far from good. Hyde is an evil, cruel person that is a cold-blooded killer. Mr. Hyde despises being out in the public, but when he must, he avoids showing his face because it has a “sense of deformity” (Stevenson 15). Hyde even tries to take over Jekyll by “transforming randomly in the middle of the night” (Stevenson 64). The potion had gone terribly wrong and Jekyll needed to end this madness.
To come to a close, all novels have some sort of theme within the context. The theme is what shapes the events such as Beowulf and Jekyll and Hyde. If these two novels had different themes, the outcome and events would be changed on way or another.