ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

letteratura inglese

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

He was born in Edinburgh and he studied law. When he was a child he had suffered from ill health, nevertheless he took up a life of adventure and travelling. His famous story is 'Treasure Island', after that he returned to London and started his career as a writer. He dedicated all his life for his works and he dese 555c25f rves recognition for his imaginative powers alone. His technique is formal and sophisticated, the narrative technique is based on letters and diaries.

Stevenson divides good and evil. In 'Treasure Adventure' it's marked because those forces fought each others, but in 'The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', evil triumphs and, slowly, destroys good.

While Mary Shelley's Frankenstein combined the pieces of corps and brought biological laws, Jekyll interferes with man's psychological and moral nature because the evil, in contrast with good, is inside the man. Stevenson combined these Gothic motifs with a new genre of novel (pre- Freudian).

He narrated in third person, the narrator is omniscient, various characters had the point of view, so the knowledge in incomplete and it gives suspense to the story. He used as technique the letters, in fact the end of the story and the truth is revealed by letters.

In this story appears the dualism between good and evil, man's ego and libido. Stevenson want to think to the reader if the desire to be good is illusory or if men have to give space to the irrational impulses.

Story It's the last chapter, where Jekyll's law and Utterson found two letters (one of Dr. Lanyon and one of Jekyll) and the Mr Hyde's corp. In Dr Lanyon's letter he said that he knows Jekyll's secret, but in his letter, Jekyll explains the real situation about Mr Hyde and him.

Riassunto Dr Jekyll said about his discovered and he said man has two personalities: one good and one evil, but he supposed that can exist three or four personalities, nobody knows. He tried to separate these personalities, in fact he narrated how he brought the ingredients and some elements, which are able to separate the two natures. When he drunk the potion, he knew that he risked death, but after that he felt some new emotions: he felt younger, lighter, happier in body and with a new heady recklessness. But when he drunk it he had a grinding in the bones and a deadly nausea; but the really change is the wicked: he lost his innocence. When he looked to the mirror, he saw a new man, his evil personality, Mr Hyde.