"[...] represents the breaking of the integrity of the person, the splitting of good from evil, and above all the birth of a man's dialogic relationship with himself. Here, as in the best pages on the splitting of consciousness, Stevenson experiments with the principle so dear to the novel of adventure and mystery, and made intensely problematic by Dostoevsky's work, according to which everything in man lives on the border of its opposite: nobility of soul thrives on the border with abjection, love on the borders of hatred, good on those of evil. In these terms Markheim's confession to himself takes place in the tragic doubling on the fatal threshold [...]."