Structure

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is divided into ten chapters. The title of each chapter summarizes that chapter’s contents; for example, “Dr Jekyll was quite at ease” and “Dr Lanyon’s narrative”. This structure divides the narrative into several “incidents”, which together unravel the mystery of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’s strange relationship. Several of the chapter titles sound like newspaper headlines, such as “The Carew murder case” and “Incident at the window”. This gives the story an air of authenticity, as though it is reporting a crime case people might have read about in the newspaper at the time.

The main part of the narrative unfolds chronologically. However, Stevenson makes extensive use of flashbacks, with different characters recollecting different incidents in relation to Jekyll and Hyde. For example, in the first chapter, Mr Enfield tells Mr Utterson a story about seeing Hyde injure a little girl: “the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground.” (p. 7)

The climax of the story seems to come in the chapter titled “The last night”, when Mr Utterson and Poole t...