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I’ve read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde before in multiple formats: from picture books to abridged versions to the original text. Just as with fairy tales and biblical anecdotes, the idea of “Jekyll vs. Hyde” is ingrained into our Western culture. But the beauty of Stevenson’s literature is found in the fact that even when the reader knows the premise of the entire plot, the short story always has more to give and continues to grab the reader.
Stevenson is able to craft a story that’s entrancing and thought-provoking even when the plot is known.
He’s able to condense a rich and powerful story to under sixty pages through the use of a plethora of rhetorical strategies that add depth and layers to this complicated commentary on human nature.
The characters and their nature, really the focal point of the entire story, are described perfectly. For example, Mr. Utterson is characterized as one that 'spent his words as rarely as gold' and Hyde is depicted as having the ability to make people uncomfortable with just a glance, 'with a sneering coolness – like the devil himself'.
These small details scattered throughout the novella tell us just as much - arguably more - about these men than any amount of background information or character description that could have been provided.
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Here we see how Stevenson’s deft writing eliminates the need for long and arduous sections of setup, although the reader is never given the sense that they’re being thrown into a overwhelmingly accelerating narration.
Stevenson, restricted by the length of his work, crafted his themes in a very straightforward manner that engaged the reader in a way similar to George Orwell’s works.
Instead of writing the subtleties and nuances into his literature, he forces the reader to read between the lines to find them by engaging the text on another level.
This forces anyone who wants to grasp the true meaning of the conflict between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to more actively involve themselves with the text. In fact, their story can easily be viewed as an overvalued fairy-tale of sorts with a simplistic moral if not read with the necessary intensity and commitment. Stevenson essentially locks his insights on society and human nature away from those unwilling to sacrifice the time and effort needed to extract them. In general, his writing is genius.
For example, consider this sentence: “I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me could avail to break.” The context that encases this line is immaterial. Although it, along with every other line in Jekyll and Hyde, is an essential piece in the overarching story, Stevenson is able to craft it so that it can independently provide its own beauty; like a flower plucked from a blooming field. It is, as one reviewer put it, “solid gold”. The structure and methods that Stevenson uses to comment on human nature brilliantly achieve their purpose.
This piece of literature can be admired for its superb mingling of different literary devices to deliver their intended effect by stuffing a complete story in its scant number of pages by using a brilliant combination of point-of-view changes, dialogue, flashback, and epistolary components to name a few. Mark Twain once said that “If [he] had more time [he] would write a shorter letter”, emphasizing the effort and skill needed to condense writing effectively. For example, see the below excerpt: “With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two… I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent.” This sentence represents everything good Stephenson puts into Jekyll and Hyde. His carefully chosen vocabulary written by Jekyll tells us exactly what the character was thinking and allows us to branch off of his ideas and explore the more complicated and nuanced pieces of the theme. Stevenson writes to allow the reader to break free of the contextual limitations of the story and consider human nature on a much broader and frighteningly real level.
Why Their Story Doesn’t Matter In Praise of Stevenson’s Writing. (2021, Dec 15). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/why-their-story-doesn-t-matter-in-praise-of-stevenson-s-writing-essay
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