Talk:A Study in Scarlet
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why did doyle choose watson to narrate the story insted of having holmes tell the story himself? what are the benefits and drawbcks of doing it this way?
- Many books feature a highly intelligent and skillful protagonist paired with a more-or-less bumbling sidekick. Nowadays, writers probably do this because they grew up with the tradition and don't know any better, but the original motive (back in Conan Doyle's day or earlier) was probably to help the readers relate to the hero's feats of intellectual prowess. Dr. Watson gives Conan Doyle an excuse to explain Holmes's behavior. Poe did the same thing in his Auguste Dupin stories—"The Purloined Letter", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", etc. You can even find the tradition carried on in Tom Swift books. I haven't read Victor Appleton's grand originals, but the Tom Swift, Jr. series (dating from the 1950s), had the boy genius Tom paired with Bud Barclay, a genial guy who always needed Tom's inventions explained to him. The most recent Tom Swift series—the ones I grew up with—did the same thing with Rick Cantwell, Tom's good buddy who never quite got the science but was always good "testing to destruction".
- If you watch the movie Fantastic Voyage (or, better yet, read Isaac Asimov's novelization), you can see the same thing happening. The strong-jawed secret agent character, Grant, gives the writers an excuse for explaining what all the different organs do, why the ship can only stay miniaturized for so long, and so forth.
- Not all stories, or even all mysteries, follow this pattern. In Murder on the Orient Express, most of Hercule Poirot's deductions go on in his "little grey cells", without his explaining them to anybody else. We don't really discover his mental processes until he presents his solution at the end. Most of Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody books follow this pattern, too: her characters often take pride in not telling each other what they think, so only at the end are all the curtains pulled back.
- The biggest downside I can see is that the Holmes-and-Watson storytelling method makes the Watson character look, well, rather stupid, unless the writer works with care. Many readers come away with this impression, certainly; Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay that claimed Watson's intelligence was "somewhat inferior to the reader's." (Whether Borges actually believed that is hard to say—the man wrote an awful lot that wasn't serious. Check out his story "Death and the Compass" for a mystery without a Watson.) In The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Nicholas Meyer had Watson defend himself against these claims, saying that being around Holmes was enough to make anybody feel stupid.
- I suspect that I'm helping Mr. A. Nonymous finish his English homework, but I don't mind. First, because I'm probably too late anyway (by almost two months), and second because I got through AP English by copying passages from the Dada Engine. Who am I to dictate ethics?
- Anville 16:07, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)