The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

            Why do people feel a sympathetic connection to some of the most horrid villains that literature and the media conjure up? Why is it that sometimes even the nicest of people annoy us to the utmost levels? What makes someone a bad person? What makes someone a good person? None of these questions have a clear answer. Everything depends on the situation or intention. The truth is that people are not just good or bad, this is impossible; there are varied mixtures of both inside of every person. This principle of life seems to be so elementary that we know this in the back of our head, but when it counts we can never quite remember.

            The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written by Robert Louis Stevenson in an effort to make us understand this principle. We classify people as good or bad depending on their actions, but the flaw with this type of judgment is that we do not know why a person may have committed this action. “We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.” (From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). In the novel the scientist Dr. Jekyll drinks an elixir that he believes will conquer evil, although what this potion truly does is turn him into the embodiment of evil. The Doctor can drink tonics to subdue these transformations, but he always ends up as his evil once the medicine has warn off. These transformations are described as internal fights, with the character struggling to overcome his evil but never quite being able to do so.

            The hardest part for everyone is deciding that they want to be good, that they want to change. A good majority of the time this is because people feel that they do not deserve to be good. This may sound somewhat humorous, but think back to a time when you know that you did something bad, perverse, or that you know you should not have done. How long did it take other people to forgive you? How long did it take you to forgive yourself? I would argue in most cases the later question took more time; this is also proven to be true in the book. This is because when people mess up and are truly sorry for what they have done they feel as if they are not worthy of other people’s forgiveness and believe themselves to be a bad person and sometimes maybe even evil. So they succumb to their evil urges because that is who they believe themselves to be. “We accept the love we think we deserve.” (The Perks of Being a Wallflower). This quote also works with love towards oneself. A comfort may be that everyone goes through these times were they do not even believe themselves to be worthy of their own love.

            “Jesus didn’t die for the good parts of you. He didn’t die for your potential. He died for the nastiest, worst parts of you, for the lowest points of your life. He died to save you and free you from that.” (Brody Holloway) I, myself, am a very religious person and I know that not everyone else is, nor do I expect them to be, but this quote gets a point across even if you are not Christian or even religious. The Bible talks a lot about good and bad which is why it is a good example for this topic. When Jesus came into a Jewish temple and saw tax collector booths set up everywhere he became enraged because he knew that a temple, a place of worship, should not be weighed down by earthly values and possessions. He walked around flipping over tables and making a huge scene. The point is that even Jesus was not perfect. He made mistakes and got angry. How can we expect ourselves to be perfect and always do the right thing if even Jesus made mistakes sometimes? It is simple we can’t.

            The original theme that everything cannot be categorized as good or bad seemed so simple, but when beginning to discuss the topic more in depth we realize that it is not simple at all and even though we realize this does not mean we act upon it as we should. Robert Louis Stevenson must have realized the importance of realizing this and wrote a story attempting to make people understand. There is no way to find out how many people understood this from the novel written 131 years ago, or even if this is what the author meant to convey when writing his book. Although given the world today where we judge everyone and categorize everyone into these two boxes we need a book like this to show and prove to us that there is no such thing as good and evil, but only some strange grey area that resides in everyone.

            If Dr. Hyde had not dwelled on his evil and instead attempted to preserver, there is a good chance that he would not have continued to morph into his alternative self. In life everyone is always so focused on the negative that they cannot see everything that is good. All people see is what they do not have, the places they have not been, and the person that they are not, that they forget everything they do have, all of the places that they have been, and the person that they are. Maybe this war that we are fighting is not good against evil, but optimism against pessimism. Everyone has a war surging on inside of them right now. Which side will you let win?