Jake Klonsky
5/20/15
English Paragraphs Addiction:
In the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson explains a terrifying story depicting the power of addiction. Stevenson uses Jekyll and his addiction to becoming Hyde as an exploration of physiological and physical addiction. There are many ways the novella shows addiction, one of the clearest being the conversation between Jekyll and Utterson regarding Utterson’s worry for Jekyll health. Jekyll explains to Utterson, “just to put your good heart at rest, I will tell you one thing: the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde’”(58). This is Jekyll paraphrasing the cliched phrase where addicts claim they can stop any time they want. Every time he attempts …show more content…
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson uses people’s indescribable faces as a way to describe them. Stevenson's characters throughout the novella describe others as indescribable because they are so ugly, evil and mysterious they are almost shrouded in a cloud of evil or grotesqueness. During the first scene in the book after the little girl is trampled, Utterson recalls Hyde as, “‘He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable’”(41). This quote shows how Utterson cannot describe his face and how there is just something wrong with it, something indescribable. Utterson then goes on to say, “I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why”(41). This says to the reader that the reason he is indescribable is because he is so dislikable and evil. Later on in the book Utterson explains that he thinks,”If he could but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away”(49), proving that he is literally shrouded in mystery. Stevenson uses the motif of indescribable appearances to show how characters in the novella the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are shrouded in a haze of evil and