This novella seems to touch on a lot of different themes and ideas that are easy to relate to. The idea of the split personality is something that I can understand greatly. And although I am not writing about someone who suffers from a split personality disorder, I have lived my life with an alcoholic.
Like the characters of Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll, this person used substances to morph into the kind of person that they wanted to be to be comfortable with situations and their life. Dr. Hyde uses the potion to morph himself into someone who has no conscious to try to cope with his bad urges so that he feels nothing for them just like an alcoholic uses alcohol to deal with uncomfortable situations or to suppress feelings of unhappiness or sadness that they find impossible to deal with outside of the use of substance.
After a while though, it becomes difficult to see the difference between the alcoholic and the person that is sober, just as Dr. Jekyll began to morph into Mr. Hyde unknowingly. The potion however, can only be used in higher and higher doses as it seems that it has little to know effect on helping Dr. Jekyll keep himself from changing and morphing into the evil that he always is trying to suppress.
In my life I have found that sometimes as the alcoholic gets further into their disease it begins to take a hold of them. It takes a hold of every aspect of their life and there comes a point where the affects are irreversible. It begins to affect everyone around them without the alcoholic even realizing what they are doing or who they are hurting.
This is exactly what happened with Jekyll and Hyde and I thought that it was a really interesting comparison to make since I have lived first hand with someone who I have seen morph and change right before my eyes into something that I knew they did not want to be but had no control over.
2 comments:
Wow- that was a deeply personal post. but i think that it was a wonderful comparison and linked well with what we are reading. i particularly liked your verb usages of morph- like the alcohol became an out of body experience, just like that of the novel. Especially the control aspect- the morph was into an uncontrollable beast; both the drunk and mister hyde. both the sober men wanted to not become their counterparts on the logical surface, but the unconscious made both want to become the other. thus is the nature of the disease- sadly.
Wow- that was a deeply personal post. but i think that it was a wonderful comparison and linked well with what we are reading. i particularly liked your verb usages of morph- like the alcohol became an out of body experience, just like that of the novel. Especially the control aspect- the morph was into an uncontrollable beast; both the drunk and mister hyde. both the sober men wanted to not become their counterparts on the logical surface, but the unconscious made both want to become the other. thus is the nature of the disease- sadly.
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