Syuzhet

The novel narrates a tale of secrecy, crime and investigation, moving backwards towards Jekyll’s confession. It has at least three narrators – the would-be detective Mr Utterson, Dr. Lanyon and Dr. Jekyll – whose subjective and spatial experiences are in contention as discovery is deferred. In the syuzhet map this results in a series of loops as each narrator tells their tale, and lines of enquiry are frustrated or obscured.

At the start of the novel, as Utterson moves between sites in ‘real-time’, the map is dominated by direct connections between physical places. Then the passage into Jekyll’s narrative is dominated by jumps, demonstrating the narrative shift into psychological exploration and revelation of past happenings. But the dual pattern or mirroring in the map connects rather than separates the narratives and narrators. This suggests an affinity between investigator and investigated, between Utterson’s movements and those of Jekyll/Hyde. It is this association of the respectable façade and its dark underbelly that most concerns the novel. Utterson’s scrutiny of Hyde, for instance, causes him to brood ‘awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory’; he sees himself, or past self, in Jekyll.