الذي يحدث عندما يطلق العلم العنان لرغبات الأنسان ودوافعه البدائية كي تطفو على السطح وهل يمكن أن يتحول الأنسان من النقيض للنقيض في بضع لحظات لا أكثر
رواية رائعة لأحد أفضل كتاب أدب الخيال العلمي روبرت لويس ستيفنسون والتي ألهمت خيال الكتاب على مر العصور للخروج بثيمات أخرى مشابهه
This was the first adult story I read when I was younger, I remember being captivated by the idea of a dual life and man's sinister shadowy side, Now many years later this story still had me enthralled, I enjoyed this story because it contains the elements of mystery, suspense, and psychological thriller, The writing is eloquent and almost lyrical that can only come from another time, yet is readable,
The descriptive imagery along the backdrop of a foggy, dark, and Jack the Ripperesque London set the stage perfectly, The duality of good vs, evil, conscious vs. unconscious, and steadfast rigidness vs, uncompromising pleasure were themes I interpreted,
This remains one of my favorite books after all these years, This is not the last time I read it, I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys classic literature and a good story, Thanks! I had to read Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a few times before I could expel the legion of Dr, Jekylls and Mr. Hydes that infested my imagination, Countless pop culture references have robbed the story of the suspense and surprise that early readers must have enjoyed, But suspense and surprise are cheap pleasures compared to the richness that lies in the text,
Stevenson has written a perfect nightmare, Everything about the story is dreamlike, It begins with Utterson crossing into liminal space while taking a Sunday afternoon stroll with his cousin Enfield, One moment they are passing bright, clean, inviting shop fronts, The next, they come upon a dark and squalid building, Utterson doesnt know it yet, but he has just entered the Twilight Zone,
From this point on, the atmosphere is relentlessly and preternaturally gloomy, Theres a perpetual fog. The labyrinthine streets are sinister in the gaslight, This is not just nineteenth century London, This is a “city in a nightmare”,
The night after a brutal murder, Utterson escorts the police to Hydes house, It is nine oclock in the morning, but it might as well be nighttime, Even when the darkness lifts, it is brief, And these glimpses of light only serve to better highlight the darkness, The story of the Carew murder evokes more horror because it follows an illusory return to light and ordinary life,
Like a dream, Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is manylayered. There are dreams within the dream, Narratives within the narrative. Communication is oblique. Lanyon will not speak to Utterson about Jekyll, Jekyll will not reveal his reasons for avoiding Utterson, When Lanyon and Jekyll finally tell their stories, it is from the grave,
Utterson both keeps secrets and has secrets kept from him, The secrecy and silence create a mental claustrophobia, The anxiety of not knowing what is going on, The anxiety of knowing too much, Of being dangerously close to the arcane machinery that lurks behind the façade of the workaday and ordinary, His isolation is palpable.
Also like a dream, no time seems to pass between the scenes, It is simply a “fortnight later”, “Nearly a year later”, Scenes recur. A second Sunday stroll leads Utterson and Enfield to Jekylls window just as their stroll had previously led them to Hydes door,
Windows and doors are liminal places, Portals into other worlds. Private worlds. Forbidden worlds. Utterson and Enfield see Jekyll at his window at the moment he begins his involuntary transformation into Hyde, A maid looks through her window and sees Hyde murder Carew, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde begins with Hydes door and ends with Jekylls door,
The pièce de résistance of this nightmare is the nebulous yet persistent impression that something isnt quite right about Hyde.
He inspires repugnance in everyone who sees him, Enfield says it best: “he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldnt specify the point”, Though reason cannot specify the point, something deeper and more instinctual within us recoils in disgust and horror,
When I first read Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I read it as a psychological and moral story, Jekylls story. But later it was the dreamlike quality of the book that took hold of my imagination, Then I read it as a nightmare, And it is Uttersons nightmare, not Jekylls, Everything in a dream is so much more than it seems, And that is true of Stevensons nightmare as well, Bulgarian review below/Ревюто на български е подолу
“If he be Mr, Hyde”, he had thought, “I shall be Mr, Seek”.
If “Jekyll and Hyde” was a painting, it wouldve been Edvard Munchs “The Scream”, If it was a mental illness, it wouldve been dissociative identity disorder, not schizophrenia, as is the popular guess if theres more than one of you inside your head.
I would say that the story can also be likened to a long dark teatime of the soul, because it would take you just that much to read it.
Beware however, for you will ponder it for a long time afterwards and itll make your flesh creep,
I suppose it can be argued that in each of us theres something we cannot fully explain, It happens to be seen “in a bad light”, we “jump out of our skin” or we “are out of our senses”, Thinking about it, we have a slight obsession for others to perceive us in our good half, or third, or however many sides we imagine that we have.
This is probably also related to the prehistoric fear of banishment from the community, which meant certain death due to the lack of mammoth meat for dinner, or the roar of a predatory sabertoothed cat instead of “good morning”.
The strain to appear more normal than we actually are is one of the curses of mankind, Sometimes the exertion of this exhausts us completely, and we even begin to wonder if there is such a thing as “normality”, The answer, of course, is always “no”,
In his Gothic novel, Robert Louis Stevenson carries to excess the good Dr, Jekylls struggle with his inner demons, and thus the bloodchilling Hyde appears, What better metaphor for the guileful human nature than being both the protagonist and the antagonist of ones own life, One would have thought that if you cut off the sprout of evil in yourself and throw it away like a weed, it would be some sort of an ending.
However, weeds have the annoying propensity to grow under all types of unfavorable conditions, unlike goodness, which, alas, requires quite special care and everlasting nourishment.
Mr. Hyde, uprooted and then sprouting, left alone to his own devilish devices, slowly begins to choke his creator, The natural course of everything is towards chaos, Many efforts are needed to harness the chaos in ones soul, Denial though only aggravates the situation,
Mr. Hyde is an allegory of the evil which smoulders in each of us, The scientific exorcism practiced by Jekyll eloquently shows the catastrophic consequences when one isnt reconciled with all pieces of their own nature and is trying to be something they are not.
It also shows that if you try to trick the much needed equilibrium in nature, nothing good is in store for you, I dont entirely agree with Sartre, who thinks “hell is other people”, Hell is always in our own consciousness, And everything that it shows us is just an illusion,
“If he be Mr, Hyde”, he had thought, “I shall be Mr, Seek”,
Ако Джекил и Хайд“ беше картина, щеше да е Викът“ на Едвард Мунк. Ако беше заболяване, щеше да е дисоциативно разстройство на личността, не шизофрения, както е популярно да се смята, ако сте повече от един там някъде вътре. Бих казала, че историята може да се оприличи и на дълъг, мрачен следобеден чай на душата, защото толкова би ви отнело да я прочетете. Колко време след това ще си мислите за нея и ще настръхвате, е съвсем друг въпрос.
Предполагам може да се поспори, че във всеки от нас пребивава по нещо, което не можем напълно да обясним. Случва се да ни видят в лоша светлина“, излизаме извън кожата си“ или не сме на себе си“. Като се замисля, имаме лека обсебеност другите да ни възприемат откъм добрата ни половина, третина или колкото там страни си въобразява всеки, че има. Вероятно това е свързано с праисторическия страх от отлъчване от общността, който означавал сигурна смърт поради липса на мамутско месо за вечеря или рев на кръвожаден саблезъб вместо добро утро“. Напрежението да се покажем понормални, отколкото всъщност сме, е едно от проклятията на човечеството. Понякога усилието от това ни изцежда напълно и като цяло започваме да се питаме има ли такова нещо като нормалност“. Отговорът, разбира се, винаги е не“.
В своята готическа новела Робърт Луис Стивънсън довежда до крайност схватката на добрия доктор Джекил с вътрешните му бесове и така се появява смразяващият кръвта Хайд. Каква подобра метафора на лукавата човешка природа от това да си едновременно протагонистът и антагонистът на собствения си живот. Човек би помислил, че ако откъснеш издънката на злото у себе си и я захвърлиш като плевел, това ще е нещо като край. Плевелите обаче имат досадното свойство да растат при всякакви неблагоприятни условия, за разлика от доброто, на което, уви, му трябват доста специални грижи и непрекъснато подхранване. Господин Хайд, изтръгнат и после покълнал, оставен сам на себе си и собствените си дяволски развлечения, бавно започва да задушава създателя си. Естественият ход на всичко е към хаос. Много усилия трябват, за да се овладее хаосът в нечия душа. Отричането обаче само влошава положението.
Господин Хайд е алегория на злото, което тлее по малко във всеки. Научният екзорсизъм, който практикува Джекил, красноречиво показва катастрофалните последици, когато някой не се е помирил с всички части на собствената си същност и се опитва да бъде нещо, което не е. Показва също и че ако се опитате да изиграете равновесието, което е необходимо в природата, не ви чака нищо добро. Не съм напълно съгласна със Сартр, който смята, че адът това са другите“. Адът винаги е в собственото ни съзнание. А всичко, което то ни показва, е просто илюзия. Wer hat wohl noch nicht von Dr, Jekyll und Mr. Hyde gehört Nun habe ich es auch endlich geschafft, einmal zu diesem Buch zu greifen,
Ich mochte die Thematik, Spannend und schaurig.
Der Schreibstil ist natürlich etwas altertümlich, immerhin ist die Geschichte auch schon überJahre alt, Ich habe das Buch nicht im Original gelesen vielleicht wirkt sie dann noch anders,
Für mich ist es ein gutes Buch nicht mehr, nicht weniger, KUDOS, KUDOS and more KUDOS to you, Mr, Stevenson!! First, for bringing me more happy than a Slip N Slide on a scorching summer day by providing Warner Bros with the inspiration for one of my favorite cartoons, Hyde and Go Tweet:
sitelink
.
. . I mean who didn't love giant, cateating Tweety Hyde,
Second, and more seriously, when I tardily returned to your classic gothic novella as an adult, you once again redlined my joy meter with the strength and eloquence of your story craft.
You story is the gift that keeps on giving,
In both structure and content, this narrative is a work of art, From a technical perspective, it can be admired for its superb mingling of different literary devices, More importantly for me at least, the story itself is a powerful depiction of some very important ideas about humanity and what we sometimes hide behind the veneer of civilization.
Structurally, the novella crams, stuffs and presses a complete, fullyfleshed story in its scantpages by using a brilliant combo of point of view changes, dialogue, flashback and epistolary components.
In lesser hands, the amount of information and story contained in this tale would have required a lot more paper, In addition to being a model of conciseness, the change in style, in my opinion, added to the enjoyment of the story by allowing the reader to be more “present” during the narrative.
Contentwise, Stevenson really knocks the cover off the ball, Despite being written in, this tale still stands as the quintessential fictional examination of the duality of mans nature and the very human struggle between the civilized and primal aspects of our beings.
The constrained, repressive society of the Victorian Period in which the story takes place provides the perfect back drop for the model of outward English propriety, Dr.
Henry Jekyll, to battle metaphorically and literally the darker, baser but still very human desires personified in the person of Edward Hyde, What a perfect allegory between the face people wear in public and the one they take out only in private,
Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me, and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life.
Stevensons prose is engaging and I found myself pulled into the narrative from the beginning, I particularly enjoyed when Stevenson wrote of his characters reactions to being in the presence of Mr, Hyde and the palpable, pervasive, but nonpinpointable, sense of evil and dread that radiated from him, For example:
I was also impressed with Henry Jekylls description of his growing realization that man not homogenous inside his own skin but a conglomerate of competing personalities and aspects.
There is something wrong with his appearance something displeasing, something downright detestable
Hydes features were the expression, and bore the stamp, of lower elements in my soul.
The last I think for, O poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.
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 denizens
Overall, this is one of those classics that lives up to its name and rightfully belongs among the highlights of gothic fiction.
I am very, very pleased that I decided to revisit this story as I found that I loved as an adult what I could only “try to appreciate” as a child.
.stars. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!!