Within the first couple of pages for Wednesday's reading, I noticed a repetition of themed words like "voice" and "heard". We learn early on in this reading that the voice they hear and try to analyze is actually Dr. Jekyll's, while they believe it is someone else's and assume that something happened to Dr. Jekyll. The significance of these repetitious words is that it foreshadows to the moment when they first hear the suspicious voice coming from Jekyll's laboratory. It puts the emphasis on the importance of the moment when they find out that Hyde is in the lab, and the moment they realize that Hyde is actually Jekyll.
In the beginning of The Last Night, the portion of the story that these words happen in, Utterson and Poole talk about suspicious behavior that Jekyll is having. This leads them to start foreshadowing by stating the words "voice" and "heard", then on to actually hearing the voice that was being foreshadowed about. The maid who lets Poole into Jekyll's lab said, "I want you to hear, and I don't want you to be heard" (p. 853). This emphasizes what the reader should be paying attention to: the voice that comes from the laboratory.
The word "voice" is sprinkled though pages 852-852 a total of five times, which could structurally mean that the actual voice they heard is mysterious and not well structured because of the word "voice" being not repeated in an organized fashion by Stevenson. It can also be repeated just enough times to be noticed, which as I said before helps foreshadow the event of hearing the voice from the laboratory. This literary device is step one of The Method of analyzing a text, and I believe it opens the doors of the mind to create whatever meaning it wants by the use of repetitious words.
Questions:
1. If Utterson already knew that Hyde was Jekyll based on the clues from part one of the story, why did he still believe that they were different people after he saw Hyde poisoned on the floor?
2. (I believe I read that) Lanyon didn't believe in medicine? If thats true then would he have gotten better from his illness if he would have taken some himself?
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