Jekyll And Mr Hyde And Darkness Analysis

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This essay will analyse Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Lord Byron’s the “Darkness” in terms of humanity and its animalistic characteristics that lie deep within our species.
Stevenson’s novel opens with a description of Mr. Utterson. He is “cold, scanty, […] lean, long, dusty, dreary” (1645) and so on. Most of these adjectives could better describe a hanger than a person. Nevertheless, Utterson is “somehow loveable” (1645) in a way that cannot be explained. When Utterson is under the influence of alcohol and is in a safe and pleasant environment “something eminently human beaconed from his eyes” (1645). Within his comfort zone and under the influence of alcohol, Utterson becomes human, on contrary
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Enfield stated that everyone hated Hyde at “first sight” (1646), even the doctor “turn[ed] sick and white with desire to kill him” (1646). Furthermore, men had to keep women “off him […] for they were wild as harpies” (1647). This spontaneous and immediate hatred towards Hyde can be recognized as everyone’s fear of the ‘Hyde’ within themselves. To be more accurate, it is wise to say that their response is an unconscious enlargement of ‘Hyde’ in them. The detailed imagery of the “circle of […] hateful faces” surrounding one “sneering […] frightened” (1647) man makes one feel that everyone at the scene has been distorted into their personal version of Hyde. This is essential to a clear understanding of the story, for Stevenson by his emphasis on Utterson and other characters’ reaction to Hyde, demonstrates that Jekyll’s release of a second self is not a strange event, but an event which has the potential to occur to all …show more content…
In this poem Byron uses animal images to reinforce the horror of the world’s end and to reveal men as “wildest brutes” (34). As men are reduced to an animalistic state in the final hours of life, Byron shrink’s them from a human being to an insignificant member of a pack of beasts that “gnashed their teeth and howl’d” (32). Throughout this poem it is easy to find negative descriptions along with the suffix ‘less’. Byron’s Earth is “moonless” (5) and the sun appears “rayless, and pathless” (4). In the final lines of the poem the world is described as “[s]easonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless” (71). All of these negative terms help to form the tone of the poem as powerless. “[E]xtinguish 'd” (1) of the sun is extinction of the world, but most of all of men themselves. Consequently, extinction of men means loss of humanity. At the end of the world men perform nothing noble or heroic, but rather “[w]ere chill 'd into a selfish” (9) beasts. In all, Byron’s poem has only one heroic act which is performed by a dog, not a human being. This heroic dog protects the corps of his master by keeping the birds and beasts, but most of all the “famish’d men at bay” (49). Byron depicts this dog as a creature more civilized than men, while men are shown as savages fighting for survival. The “rotting” (75) which Byron so vividly depicts is a figurative metaphor for the ruin of

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