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I received my Dover Thrift Edition of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the mail today.  I'm big into online shopping so I felt the usual rush of adrenaline I'm used to feeling when I see a perfectly packaged parcel patiently waiting for me.  The novel is actually shockingly brief, which means I'm already halfway through it less than 10 hours later.

I really don't have much to report on at this point.  I've been able to draw a lot of correlations between the books I read in Ms. Pyle's Gothic novels class last semester, so I'm thankful for that experience.  Our group did try to plan it this way; we wanted fantasy-level literature but the pre-twentieth century restriction made that difficult.  Kafka was too recently published and apparently H.G. Wells is not considered an author of literary merit (I'm really bitter about this), so the Gothic area was essentially our only option.  Frankenstein and Dracula were out of the question (as we had already read them), so R.L. Stevenson came to the rescue (cue the Jekyll and Hyde song from "Arthur").

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is much like Dracula in that it is almost entirely reported from an outside perspective-- outside being someone who is not the person of focus.  I've always loved this structure in literature, as great works like Peter Pan and the Sherlock Holmes stories use certain major characters simply as tools for probing interaction and creative narratives.  These are most often found in cases in which the main character is someone so sensitive, controversial or alternative that they cannot be questioned head-on.  Sherlock Holmes is a forensic genius who could not tell a story that a typical human could understand.  Frankenstein had to be written by the monster's creator and the creator's ship-sailing comrade, as the monster himself was far too scientifically advanced and socially primitive to be able to communicate with an audience.  Peter Pan is a child with terrible mood swings, shockingly short-term memory, and a general disinterest in anything remotely solemn and simply cannot communicate with Wendy (someone he is close to) let alone an audience.  While it would be very interesting to see this book written from Dr. Jekyll's perspective (which I think it might become later on), we are able to glean a lot of information from the outside perspectives of Mr. Utterson and Mr. Enfield, two dull men who are observant of Dr. Jekyll's situation (and therefore sneak the reader information) but are far too boring to be anything more than creative modes of generating a narrative.  This slow trickle of information creates an eerie effect that prevents a 55-page novel from only being a 12-page short story (as it would probably be if it were written from Dr. Jekyll's perspective).

Every moment I spend reading a traditionally-narrated book, I love to imagine the story being written from a different character's perspective.  A Handmaid's Tale written from Nick's perspective? Oliver Twist from The Artful Dodger or Nancy's point of view?  That's some money-making stuff right there.