Free Literary Essay Sample: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Hyde, Jekyll, and Utterson. The writer has used different styles in expressing that Hyde is the dark side of the good Jekyll. For instance, the use of a third-person narrator keeps the reader anxious as to what will happen next in the plot. The use of this literal style captivates the audience and enables him or her to feel like they are a part of the story.

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The story starts with Richard and Utterson, two odd acquaintances talking about a situation that happened over the past few days. It was very unlike them to gossip about other people but due to strangeness of the happenings, this was an exception. The chit chat was about how a strange man by the name Hyde had trampled over a girl with no empathy whatsoever and then ended up paying the girls family damages by Jekyll's cheque book. The way the author brought out this paradoxical event draws up the inferences that Hyde was a very heartless and arrogant man. The question that needs to be asked is how can you wrong someone intentionally and pretend you are sorry and pay damages to the family. A sane person will not have done that, but the writer has brought out an inclination that Hyde is not normal.

From the above, the writer has already cast some doubts on the character of Hyde in the mind of the readers. From this point going forward in the story, the reader already has some assumptions of opinions formed against Hyde. Firstly it shows that Hyde is arrogant which has already been elaborated above. Secondly, it shows that Hyde is a shady person. How could he open the doctor's house and purportedly pay the family with monies belonging to the doctor?

Hyde commits several murders which shook the small town. The peculiar thing is that Utterson is somehow connected with the victims of Hyde either as a legal counsel or another capacity. It increases the curiosity of Utterson who is a lawyer. The writer uses the character of Utterson was well thought out. This is because Utterson as a lawyer was confided to by many people. Thus he was aware of a lot of things that went unnoticed by just another person. This quality of him and by his position in the society made him an important character to the story. It's only a person with analytical skills which lawyers have could discern what was wrong the good doctor. This also reflected in the story by him appearing in most scenes of the book. The layers skills help him find and pursue the clues which were evident in his way. The only thing to fault about the lawyer is that failure of his to act promptly would have saved the life of the good doctor.

Robert Louis Stevenson argued that for a person to exist he must have both good and evil in him and you cannot quite a separate one from another. The yin yang principle. Doctor Jekyll was able to defeat this argument by being able to temporarily dissociate the evil in him i.e Hyde from his goodness. His success was short-lived because of Hyde action which was causing distress upon his life.

I disagree with the line and thought of Robert because as humans it does not matter whether you are good or evil but what matters are what values you have. For instance, even though Hyde had trampled over the young girl the writer still shows that Hyde went and paid damages to the family of the girl. This show through Hyde was full of evil and no good he had seen the trouble he had caused and atoned for his sins by paying monies worth to the injured girl's family.

Another situation which disproves the writer is that Doctor Jekyll had done everything in his powers to prevent his dark side from causing harm to other people. The story tells us that the doctor's servant had feared for his life because he had locked himself up in the laboratory. The fact that can be deciphered here is that the doctor had locked himself up to prevent harm to other people. This shows that the good doctor cared very much about other people's welfare. To me, the doctor had suffered from a mental condition which had resulted in some physical anguish to his welfare as a person. It's important that the lawyer could have done something when he noticed strange things happen but it's the failure of his inaptness that led to so many hazardous events.

Works cited

Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde,. Lerner Publishing Group, 2014.

OISHI, Yasuhiko. "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde". Studies In Regional Science, vol 32, no. 1, 2001, pp. 139-154. Japan Section of the Regional Science Association International, doi:10.2457/srs.32.139.