It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together-that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. Narrator The narrator is anonymous and speaks in the third person. The unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. Time and place written 1885, Bournemouth, England. losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.

If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable Thought of the separation of these elements. It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only.

Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. “I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

Mr hyde by robert louis stevenson