The Conflicts in Markheim, Essay Example

“Markheim” (1985) is one of the most popular works of Stevenson. The story revolves around a criminal Markheim, who ventured to rob a pawn shop on the Christmas Eve. Whether a purposive act or a sinister provocation, Markheim eventually kills the pawn broker and settles to find the cash.  In the meantime a supernatural entity appears before him. Compounded by the phobic presence, Markheim’s conscience eluded and transformed his brutal instincts to one of remorse and surrender.

Markheim being the central character of the story was trapped within the coherence of his innate self.  He had spent a life full of atrocities and sins, which had purged his emotional existence. The dichotomy of his past and present, “damned reminder of years, and sins and follies” initiated hallucinations with his own conscience and he suffered at the emotional behest of his feelings, “his face repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him.” Yet his dynamism was proven when he decides to move on in the path of truth.

Another protagonist is the visitor (“this thing was not of the earth and not of God”) who looks and smiles at him, “as if in friendly recognition”.  This virtual, ambiguous, double, “likeness to himself” describes the opposing forces of malevolence in the individual, who is often interpreted as the embodiment of Markheim’s conscience.

The main theme of the novel is the conflict between the good and evil. The conversation between Markheim and the visitor reveals that Markheim’s double is his worse self that magnifies his propensity to evil, but at the same time, being a projection of his conscience, calls his better side, becoming the agent of his own redemption.

Markheim challenged the visitor about the co-existence of both good and evil in his human self. To prove this point, he refused to oblige the insinuations made by the visitor – to kill the dealer’s servant ad flee. Instead, he said to the servant, “You had better go to the police. … I have killed your master.”

External conflict

People vs. People:  The dealer was “unloving, unbeloved” and was only concerned with money. He made cynical comments and ridiculed Markheim’s love life, “Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard favored”. Thus, the murder was not all about money and shows the external conflict of Markheim.

People vs. nature: When Markheim reaches the upper floor of the house for money, Markheim suddenly “fears the laws of nature”. He says that “I have lived to belie my nature”. Stevenson undermines the appeal of Markheim to natural tendencies as a reason to dispose and deny moral responsibility.

People vs Society: Markheim surrendered to the police and in this act he revealed the conflict of people vs society. “Life as he reviewed it tempted him no longer”- he was no longer a slave to the societal ethos and bondage.

Internal conflict

The conflict prepares the psychological story in Markheim.  The struggle, which Stevenson here explains, is purely internal. It is the murderer’s struggle with himself; or to be more precise, the conflict between two natures’s in him. The shopkeeper he kills is only an incidental presence; the real character is the soul of Markheim.