This definitions covers The Vocabulary for Jekyll within Jekyll (character) for GCSE English Literature. Revise Jekyll (character) in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for GCSE English Literature with 13 exam-style questions and 15 flashcards. This topic shows up very often in GCSE exams, so students should be able to explain it clearly, not just recognise the term. It is section 11 of 17 in this topic. Make sure you can use the exact wording confidently, because definition marks are often lost through vague language.
📜 The Vocabulary for Jekyll
- Duality
- The state of having two contradictory aspects. Stevenson uses Jekyll to argue that every person contains both a social self and a suppressed self — and that the suppression is itself dangerous.
- Unreliable narrator
- A narrator whose account cannot be fully trusted. Jekyll's Full Statement is the most unreliable document in the novella — he confesses everything while excusing himself for most of it.
- Dissociation
- Treating one's own actions as if they belong to someone else. Jekyll's grammar — "Henry Jekyll stood aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde" — performs dissociation structurally.
- Tragic flaw (hamartia)
- The quality that destroys the protagonist. Jekyll's hamartia is his belief that respectability and desire can be separated rather than integrated.
- Complicity
- Participation in wrongdoing. Jekyll is complicit in Hyde's acts because Hyde exists only through Jekyll's choices — the experiment, the drug, the laboratory. Stevenson never lets Jekyll forget this.
Practice questions for Jekyll (character)
In which chapter of the novella does Jekyll directly narrate his own story for the first time?
Identify ONE technique Stevenson uses in the following extract, and explain its effect on the reader: "I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life."