There is a quote by Sirius Black—one of J.K. Rowling’s characters’—that says, “We’ve all got both light and dark inside of us. What matters is the part we choose to act on, that’s who we really are”. Everyone has both a good and evil side; it is up to them to decide which side they portray in their life. At the beginning of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll is seemingly the good character, but as the story develops, one can tell that Jekyll is as evil—or more evil—then Hyde because of Jekyll’s hatred for Hyde, his love of self, and his over exaggerated self duality.
The animosity Jekyll felt towards Hyde causes Jekyll to turn evil. Jekyll’s “hatred for Hyde was of a different order.” The fear of Hyde “drove [Jekyll] to constantly commit temporary suicide, and return” to being Hyde (53). Jekyll hated to become Hyde, but did it in order to continue with his experiment. Jekyll was willing to turn back
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Jekyll realized that he “is not truly one, but two” (43). Hyde is Jekyll’s other half, even if he had not have drank the potion to turn into Hyde, Jekyll would have always had evil thoughts. Man is too complex to be either good or evil. If you have only good, one day it will be so good it would be evil, and vise versa. You have to have good and evil to balance yourself. Before Jekyll started his experiment he told himself that if each side—good and evil—“could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his twin” (43). If a person was good or evil, not both, the person could live their life without remorse. That was Henry Jekyll’s original idea. But as the experiment progresses, Jekyll realizes that one cannot live without the other part of themselves. In order to feel complete, one has to have both good and evil in ones’