THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE "SELF" AND THE "OTHER".
The film Fight Club and the novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde deal with the subject of duality in human nature. Both the major character in the film, Jack played by Edward Norton, has a double who is called Tyler and the protagonist of the short novel, Jekyll has also a double who is known as Mr Hyde.
In both the film and the novel there is a "self" and an "other". In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde the "self" has to commit suicide in order to kill his "other" and he dies as well. Here there is no winner or loser. However in the film Jack who is the "self" kills his "other" and becomes the winner. He reaches his identity through Tyler, his other, but when he realises that the other is becoming dangerous for him(the self) he has the power to stop the other's destructive effects. However, Dr Jekyll does not have the same power to stop his destructive other. .
The Victorian society in which the characters of the book lived is a society "prizing decorum and reputation above all and prefers to repress or even deny the truth if that truth threatens to upset the conventionally ordered world view"[3] This is what Jekyll tries to do from his very early age, he says:.
".It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations, then any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and with even a deeper trench than the majority of man, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature"(Stevonson,49) .
Jekyll always tries to hide his bad or evil side which exists in all of us to a certain degree and he always tries to be seen perfect. His struggle to hide his other side creates a duality in his character. The Victorian society in which he lives forces him to be good and perfect, because this period highly favours the ideal one instead of the real one. "The Victorian value system largely privileged reputation over reality and this prioritisation is reflected both in the narrator's remarks about Utterson and Enfield.
