“I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.” (43)
In this passage of The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll reflects back on his decision to attempt to split his evil side from himself. He expresses his regret and that his, at first seemingly great idea, backfired and, in the end, made him more miserable than before. What I find interesting is that he expresses his coming to that knowledge not as a learning process that he made, but that something/someone made him come to that conclusion. It makes me wonder if he feels that he turning into Mr. Hyde was, for the most part, his destiny. The way he expresses himself in this passage, from a letter to Mr. Utterson to explain himself after his death, sounds like a warning. A warning to mankind never to try to repeat his doings. The second time he uses the word ‘made’ in his sentence, Dr. Jekyll also acknowledges, that he has failed in his attempt to cast off the “doom and burthen” (43) of his life. Though it seems as if it had worked in the beginning, he soon finds that he has rather enforced his evilness and given it the power to take over his ’good’ side. It is a metaphor of the importance for a balanced scale of good and evil. Having both of these sides in us, and keeping them in balance, is what makes us human and we cannot survive without them.