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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fight Club, and Strangers on a Train all explore the deadly consequences of letting your id run free. With the portrayal of various character’s id and ego in the stories you arrive at the question of the true nature of humans and how it differs due to a character’s society and their personal biases. A person’s id is not in its essence evil; it is merely the manifestation of that person’s suppressed natures, which is determined by their society and what is viewed as evil or scandalous, driven by their goals and aspirations. 

What is evil? For a thing that dictates revolting actions why is it so imaginary? Evil is a subjective term and relative to what society views as morally wrong, but how can the id represent something that isn’t constant, unless itself is dependent on circumstance? This also brings up the age old debate of nature verses nurture, questioning weather people are born evil or a forged into evil people by their experienced post-birth. Because every society has a different classification of what is “evil” each work has it’s own interpretation. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is set in an era in which promiscuity and violence are the most scandalous acts imaginable. Similar to Jack the Ripper, Mr. Hyde’s spontaneous fits of rage, that often result in the injury or death of others, cause quite a disruption in his society. People who witness his treacherous and heartless acts, such as when he, “trampled calmly over the child's body and left her screaming on the ground,” or when he was, “trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway,” describe him as a horrendous madman; they can’t comprehend how he is able to commit such callus acts because they are so unacceptable in their society that the thought of anyone carrying out actions such as these is unfathomable. In Strangers on a Train their society views murder as evil, as Guy so playfully points out to Bruno, ““I may be old-fashioned, but I thought murder was against the law.” This society also stigmatizes failing a marriage by getting a divorce or separating, although it is legal it is taboo enough that, especially once Guy’s wife is pregnant, it would be less scandalous for her to die than for him to divorce her, leading to his and Bruno’s arrangement. Fight club is set more currently, in an era of increased violence creating a lack of sensitivity toward personal violence, which is replaced by a fear for belief-driven violence and terrorism. A society in which terrorism paranoia is so high that airport security officers check all vibrating bags for bombs when, as the one the narrator encounters states, “Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while… it's a dildo,” and they rarely actually succeed in thwarting a terrorist attack. In each of these works the id characters chose to revolt to their society and lash out by committing the acts their society views as most evil. Mr. Hyde murders a man, Guy tries to divorce his pregnant wife and then Bruno kills her, and Tyler used liposuction fat soap bombs to attempt to blow up key economic buildings and crash the system of wealth-based privilege. All of these embodiments of id pull their acts of terror from what their society defines as evil in order to achieve the optimal response from their peers.

      Suppressed nature spawns revolt because once it rises to the surface and takes control it’ main goal is to fulfill it’s personal desires. The id only manifests from those who suppress their tendencies to commit acts defined by society as evil or scandalous. Each ego character’s focus of suppression is unique and ha s direct correlation to what their society considers evil. In Fight Club, the narrator suppress his hatred for anti-consumerism when initially obsessing over things as superficial as, “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?,” this results in his id’s, Tyler’s, choice to have his cult combat the high importance their society places on consumerism. You can see the contrast in the Narrator’s original verses Tyler’s later comments on consumerism; early on in the movie after the narrator’s condo burns down the narrator says, “Look, nobody takes this more seriously than me. That condo was my life, okay? I loved every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was ME!” conversely later on in the movie Tyler says, “We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.” In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll’s society is so suppressive in the way he is expected to look and act all the time that Mr. Hyde acts as his outlet to be free, this id become a place where he can let go mentally and physically and revolt against his repressive society. Jekyll’s need to transform into Hyde to escape his reality shows the negative effect of years of enduring this crushing need to conform to his society and hide his true desires, he explains that, “I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures.“ In Strangers on a Train, Guy suppresses his desires to reach his political career at all costs, but Bruno acts a way to neglect societal laws and commit treacheries to ensure his future, such as the murder of his first wife and marriage to a second to improve his social status. Since Guy is also always in the public’s view and under their scrutiny, which his wife even uses against him when threatening to disclose she’s pregnant if he tries to divorce her, and Bruno acts as a voyager to allow Guy to get what he wants without ruing his public image and status, which Bruno is able to do because of his anonymity. Guy comments on how he believes that, “Everyone has somebody that they want to put out of the way,” and how, “My theory is that everyone is a potential murderer,” exemplifying his belief that the desire and willingness to commit murder is suppressed in everyone, and usually lies dormant through their lives due to the strength of society’s suppression of them. Although initially rendered inert by these suppressed desires imposed on their egos by their society, each id ultimately thrives from the character’s innate desire to revolt against this repression.

      The personal, and often selfish, goals of a character are what drive them to commit actions their egos and definitely superegos do not approve of. The id is very task-driven and a character’s objectives direct their id, so unknowingly an ego is fueling the id’s often-destructive fire. Since the goals of each character are unique their id’s interpret and try to fulfill them in different ways. In Fight Club the narrator suffers from insomnia and one of his goals is to break free from it, Tyler appears to solve this by taking over his nightly affairs and giving the narrator the feign of sleep. The narrator also has a suppressed goal to break away from his society’s consumer central culture and Tyler attempts this by creating the Fight club, organizing a cult, and becoming a terrorist. When the narrator says that they have gone to far and he wants out, Tyler puts it astutely, “What do you want? Wanna go back to the shit job, fuckin' condo world, watching sitcoms? Fuck you, I won't do it,” and the truth is the narrator doesn’t want to return to his life before Tyler, before Fight Club, because they gave him the outlet and purpose he desired. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll initially wants to complete some sort of experiment on his theories on people’s split personalities, and Mr. Hyde is the product of these experiments and perpetuates the study further by refusing to stop the transformations due to his goal of survival. Jekyll’s idea for his transformation experiment originated from his realization that, “With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.” Wishing to explorer this duality of man further, Dr. Jekyll splits his personality and Mr. Hyde is born. Although Dr. Jekyll might have not been conscious to this goal initially he wanted to find a way to break free of his repressive society and Mr. Hyde acted as the outlet where he could fulfill this inner desire and be set free. In Strangers on a Train, Guy’s goal is to marry up and become a politician, which Bruno assures by killing his current wife, giving him the opportunity to remarry. His prospects for life are so apparent that Bruno, a complete stranger, is able to identify them and carry out actions to ensure they are fulfilled, as Guy explains to Anne, ““He read all about me in the newspapers and magazines. He knew about me, Miriam, and you. He told me that if he were to get rid of Miriam so I would be free to marry you, I should kill his father so he could be free of him.” Bruno is driven by his goal of getting Guy to murder his father for him and to in general forge a friendship with Guy. Overall, the level of similarity and overlap in the id’s and ego’s goals is what determines the success of a character. 

A character’s aspirations, often-physical ones, dictate how they view their id’s appearance. The id’s physical representation is interesting to take into account when diagnosing the character’s mission to break social restrictions or fulfill their own desires for societally acceptable attractiveness. In Fight Club, Tyler represents how the narrator wants to look and act, as Tyler explains to the narrator, “All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.” Interestingly, his aspirations to look stereotypically attractive, exemplified by how he imagines Tyler looking, is constrained by the societal standards for appearance and contradicts his anarchist behavior. At first glance Hyde is off-putting and a seemingly unappealing front for Jekyll to use and present to the world. Jekyll describes Hyde as being, “much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll,” having evil that, “had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay,” and of being so revolting that, “none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh.” Jekyll contrasts these statements by explaining, “yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome.” For Jekyll, Hyde’s repulsive appearance affords Jekyll the opportunity to break out of his society’s strict formal dress and stringent expectations for overall appearance. In Strangers on a Train, Bruno is able to be brutally honest, flamboyant, violent, and other societally taboo characteristics, while Guy is restrained by the social status he wants to attain, and the level of conduct expected of that status. Bruno’s theory is that, “you should do everything before you die,” allowing him to take advantage of every opportunity to satisfy his desires, while Guy simply resorts to suppressing them. So even though Bruno might not represent how Guy aspires to look he does represent Guy’s desires of what suppressed characteristics he would be able to express publicly without fear of being outcaste. The physical representation of a character’s id exemplifies what outlet they are trying to reach with their id and what appearance will best achieve this goal.

Overall, every character has a id, superego, and ego duking it out inside of their brains, dictating their every action, but it is not until we get these separate mindsets displayed in different embodiments that we can truly see the depths of the character’s inner struggle between fulfilling the personal desires and goals and staying within the restraints of their society.