Jekyll and Hyde: Characters, Plot, and Analysis
Basic Information
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Type of story: Mystery, drama, horror, and suspense
Setting: City of London in 1884
Characters
Main Characters
Dr. Henry Jekyll, Edward Hyde, Gabriel Utterson, Poole, Hastie Lanyon, Richard Enfield, Sir Danvers Carew, Mr. Guest
Protagonist: Dr. Henry Jekyll
Dr. Jekyll is a doctor of Medicine, in Law, and a member of the Royal Academy. He is a close friend of the lawyer Utterson and Lanyon. He believes that through an experiment he can separate good and evil from people, and he succeeds. He is intelligent, cultured, rich, and very polite and respectful of people. A mature doctor, discontent, surrounded by friends, with life expectations and strong emotions. He is tall and thin and is about 50 years old.
Antagonist: Edward Hyde
Hyde is the evil part of Dr. Jekyll, violent, short, dresses very simply, and produces a sense of anguish as he passes by. This character is created by Dr. Jekyll from the dark part of his soul. Physically, he is a deformed, disgusting, and evil being.
Gabriel Utterson
Utterson is a lawyer and friend of Dr. Jekyll and Lanyon. He speaks in a very cultured way. He is respectful to everyone and is also very polite. He admired, almost with envy, the great presence of the spirit involved in his bad actions, and in any circumstance, he was more inclined to help than to condemn. He is a rough, skinny, tall character, with an elegant appearance in his clothes, cold, sober, short in words, and somewhat unsociable in conversations and feelings. He is about 50 years old.
Hastie Lanyon
Lanyon is a doctor and is a friend of Utterson and Dr. Jekyll. He is very polite and a good person. He was a cordial, healthy, red-faced gentleman with white hair, loud and determined manners, polite, and an old friend of Utterson.
Poole
The character that I liked most about this novel is the butler Poole because he is very faithful to his master, Dr. Jekyll, since he has been working at his side for 20 years and he cares for him, even seeking the help of Utterson when he convinces himself that something has happened to his master.
Plot Summary
Mr. Utterson, a prestigious London lawyer, hears a story from his friend Mr. Enfield that makes him curious and starts an investigation to find out the true identity of Mr. Hyde, a man who is very close to an old friend known as Dr. Jekyll. Investigations lead him first to a will in which Jekyll becomes a depositary in the event that Hyde disappears or dies, of all his property. Later, the lawyer will have a conversation with the doctor, who will ask him to forget the matter. There is a cruel murder in the city; a witness assures that the murderer has been Mr. Hyde. After a long period of searching, he does not appear, and the strange disease and death of Lanyon occurs. After a long time of tranquility, one night Poole, Jekyll’s servant, appears at the lawyer’s house to ask for his help. Utterson moves to his friend’s house, and after knocking down the laboratory door, they find Hyde’s corpse along with letters. Already at home, Utterson prepares to read them; it is the letter from Jekyll in which the strange case is explained: the doctor had a clear obsession, which was to divide the two natures of the person, that of good and evil. This is achieved by a potion that he invents; when the baby becomes an evil being, that is Mr. Hyde. Increasingly, he appropriated his body until he reached the point where they both hated each other. The doses were running out, and he did not find the appropriate substance for the potion, until it was over they both fought against each other, but the end of the product arrived, and both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde find death.
Vocabulary
- Painful situation: situació dolorosa
- Get rid: desfer-se
- Annoyed: molest
- Lawyer: advocat
- Unharmed: il·lès
- Cupboard: armari
- Clerk: secretari
- Shameful: vergonyós
- Sickness: malaltia
- Whispered: xiuxiuejat
Personal Opinion
In my opinion, this is a story that intimately involves us. The moral of this story is that evil is within us, is a constituent of our being; we can defeat him but never eliminate him at all, and we must not play with him, or else we run the risk of being destroyed like Dr. Jekyll.