Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde Comparison

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a book by Robert Louis Stevenson based in the dark streets of 19th century London, England. The protagonist is Dr. Henry Jekyll, a doctor of medicine who is well known and respected by the community but also experiments in his spare time. His main experiment of late is to separate the good and evil of a single man, as he believes that they are two separate entities confined in one person. He succeeds at first, splitting himself into two personas: his normal Dr. Jekyll, and the thoroughly evil Mr. Hyde, who lives out Jekyll’s darkest and most violent wishes. His closest friends, Dr. Lanyon and Mr. Utterson are vaguely aware of his experiments but don’t discuss them often and are oblivious to his transformations until the end of the novel since Mr. Utterson believes that he should stay out of his friends’ business and Dr. Lanyon finds the experiments immoral and against a doctor’s Hippocratic Oath. Most of the story is told from their perspective or a third person perspective to show character development and to keep the truth surrounding Jekyll’s experiments from the reader until a later point. This paper will compare the themes and accuracy of the movie adaptations from 1920 and 1931 in the areas of mystery surrounding Jekyll’s experiment, his transformation, his sinful excursions, his relationship with his friends, and …show more content…
By focusing on one of his friends, we were confined to Utterson’s knowledge, and since he believed in staying out of others’ lives the resulted in a lack of information which keeps the reader in suspense. In both movies, however, the entire story is from Jeykll’s point of view so the audience knows from the beginning that Jekyll is Hyde because we witness his first and subsequent transformations; this results in the movies being slightly more dramatic than suspenseful as in the