The identity of the monster in our hearts!
Jekyll and Hyde, first encountered in literature

The fifth installment of the "Cloud Library Youth Modern Classics" series, which introduces classic original works that are constantly being reborn as musicals, movies, and dramas, providing inspiration for creative works.

Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's short story 'Jekyll and Hyde' is a work that portrays the duality of good and evil latent in human nature through a split character.
Set in a gloomy, fog-shrouded London, the film weaves together a mixture of horror and mystery as it follows the story of a man driven by his evil nature as he pursues his secrets.
This novel, which had already discerned the unconscious desires latent in human nature before Freud, has become a classic in psychology and mystery drama, with its unique themes and plots consistently cited.
It is frequently cited as a subject of study that explores the inner nature and psychology of humans, and has been recreated in musicals and movies, and is still loved today, 130 years later.

This book faithfully preserves the sentences of the original English novel, but discards the translation and archaic language, and refines them into solid Korean sentences that are easy to read like a modern novel.
As an appendix, we included commentary on the musical and novel works, allowing young people to delve deeper into how the original novels are reinterpreted in various artistic genres and become a source of new creations.

I was born as a human being with two different appearances and personalities.
One was Hyde, the perfect embodiment of evil, and the other was Henry Jekyll, in a state of hopeless disharmony that could neither be reversed nor improved.

It's hard to express.
There's something strange about it.
I would say it's something unpleasant and disgusting.
I have never seen a man so repulsive.
But I don't really know why.
It was just a weird feeling, I guess? It's hard to say exactly, but it felt like something was falling apart and twisting.
I can't say it's normal, but I can't really put my finger on it...

Hyde, losing his mind, swung his cane, knocked the old man to the ground, and began to trample and beat him like an angry monkey.
The old man's body fell to the ground with the sound of bones breaking.

I fell into the sweet illusion that I could separate good from evil.
I believed that if I could separate these two elements into separate selves, I would be free from all the unbearable suffering in life.

Fantasies of wild excitement and disordered sensuality welled up like a spring.
I felt as if I had been freed from the shackles of all responsibility, and an inexplicable sense of liberation, a kind of impure soul, enveloped me.


I was honest with both sides of myself.
There was no difference between me when I threw away my self-restraint and did something shameful and me when I proudly pursued my studies or helped the sad and suffering.

He was natural and human.
This new body seemed to me to have a living soul, and to express myself more clearly and concisely than the imperfect and dualistic being I had hitherto been.

--- From the text