Tag: Dr. Jekyll

What Makes Us Human

“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.

The Last Night

Passage 2: “Then you must know, as well as the rest of us, that there was something queer about that gentleman and something that gave a man a turn—I don’t know rightly how to say it beyond this: that you felt in your marrow—kind of cold and thin.” (pg. 31)

When this passage is presented in the story, the characters Poole (Jekyll’s butler) and Mr. Utterson are meeting. Poole believes there may have been foul play in regards to Mr. Jekyll, potentially a poisoning by drugs. The two men enter a laboratory and see and hear someone else inside. The mystery character is masked, as to not reveal his identity. Because of this uncertainty, they wonder if the masked person is Mr. Hyde. After the quotation, on the top of the next page, Poole tells Mr. Utterson, he is almost sure that the masked figure was Hyde. They wonder if Hyde murdered Mr. Jekyll, and if so, why is he staying near his victim verses fleeing?  The two long hyphens are significant because they allow for a break in the remarks, where the author has allowed the characters to interject thoughts of their own. This shows the hesitancy they have. The use of the correlation between marrow feeling cold and thin is very interesting because one does not feel the marrow in their bones, but it gives the reader a dark, mysterious feeling about the character being described, Mr. Hyde. This quotation to the story is important because although it is describing only one small portion of a character, it gives the reader a feeling that something dramatic and dark is about to happen. The words “something queer about that gentleman and something that gave a man a turn” put the reader on edge slightly. The author is making the point that there is something not quite right with the character that makes you question what has he done, or what is he about to do??