Dr Jekyll And Hyde Duality Analysis

In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, the author employs the use of duality to effectively represent the differentiation between good and evil through the description of effects on Dr. Jekyll himself, his friends, and his relationships. First off, the reader sees the changes that take place with Dr. Jekyll when his evil alter ego, Mr. Hyde is brought up. Stevenson describes jekyll as “a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a stylish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness-...”(Stevenson 16), however, when Mr. Utterson mentions the name of Mr. Hyde, Jekyll’s face “grew pale to the very lips, and there came a blackness about his eyes”(Stevenson 17). This exchange between the two friends shows the reader both sides of Henry …show more content…
Jekyll into a pale, cold, unfriendly figure. Being early in the story, this should spark the reader’s curiosity about Jekyll’s sudden change of personality. In addition, the seesaw between Jekyll and Hyde had profound effects on Jekyll’s friends, Dr. Lanyon in particular. Stevenson writes, “The rosy man(Dr. Lanyon) had grown pale; his flesh had fallen away; he was visibly balder and older; and yet it was not so much these tokens of a swift physical decay that arrested the lawyer’s notice, as a look in the eye and quality of manner that seemed to testify to some deep-seated terror of the mind”(Stevenson 30), to describe how Lanyon, a once rosy and cheerful man, had undergone such a drastic change and now lay on his deathbed. It can be inferred that Lanyon witnessed something horrible and had a shock so deep that he couldn’t recover. Again, the description of Lanyon gets the wheels in the mind of the reader turning about what could have possibly caused such a horrible thing to happen to the doctor. Furthermore, the Jekyll/Hyde alter ego has a negative effect on Jekyll and Utterson’s once positive