Duality of Human Nature

The crowd forced the man to give money to this girl for trampling over her. Hyde did not run over her for any reason. He just did it out of spite and evil. He represents all the evil in the world. When people see Hyde, they feel the urge to kill him because they can sense his evil nature. His physical appearance brings out the worst evil in other people. Since Hyde represents evil, he is symbolically much smaller than Dr. Jekyll. Stevenson uses Mr. Enfield's narrative voice to give the reader multiple views, and his unique structure strengthens the theme of good and evil.
             The second scene starts with Mr. Utterson looking at Jekyll's will. The will says that in case of decease or unexplained absence for more than three months that Edward Hyde receives all of Jekyll's belongings. Utterson decides to go see Dr. Hastie Lanyon, an old friend of his and Jekyll's to see if he knows anything about Mr. Hyde. A quick description of Lanyon gives the reader a picture of what he looks and acts like. The narrator relates, "This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided manner. The geniality, as was the way of the man, was somewhat theatrical to the eye" (Stevenson 46). Stevenson's delineation of Lanyon suggests he is a clean-cut doctor and engages in rational, materialist science. Lanyon speaks dismissively of Jekyll's experiments, and his scientific skepticism renders him, an embodiment of rationalism and a proponent of materialist explanations. As such, he becomes a mirror image of Jekyll. Both are doctors, well-respected and successful, yet they have chosen different paths. Stevenson uses Dr. Lanyon's narrative voice to give the reader another doctor's view on the dual nature of man. .
             It is appropriate, then, that Lanyon is the first person to see Jekyll transform into Hyde. "The great advocate of material causes is witness to undeniable proof of the reality of the metaphysical, a physically impossible phenomenon" (Nabokov 3457).