Reading through the opening description of Utterson in the novel, I am once again struck by the profound duplicity of the character description. This duplicity or narrative contradiction ‘anchors’ the rest of the novel to deceit. Nothing and no-one are transparent or indeed transparently themselves- even the narrative performance is an assembly of ‘boxed’ in narratives ironically emulating the highly ambivalent spaces occupied by Dr Jekyll and his double Mr Hyde when they are ‘at home.’ ( cf Freud’s uncanny) So we move from one narrator to another, aware that each narrator seals in his own viewpoint within an oblique and ‘Victorian’ vocabulary of repression and circumlocution.
If ever there was a text designed to introduce readers to textual instability and ambivalance this must be it! Stevenson makes the reader distrust everyone; even the ‘author’ seems quiet literally ‘away’ an absence which both tantalises and confounds. Read the first two pages of the novel and then analyse what exactly has been said;seek in vain for the reassurance of certainty and disclosure: this is indeed a self-collapsing narrative which seeks to veil its ‘grotesque heart’ through the collapse of binary oppostions and ‘knowledges.’ This closeting of truth, this labyrithine duplicty shields the reader only partially from what we suspect lurks behind all these midnight strolls with male friendsand from dark goings on in prohibited spaces- the snatched consummations of homosexual desire.