Holmes Is Holmes, Be He Ever so Humble

1016 Words5 Pages
Sherlock Holmes is known by some as quite the literary hero. His skills of inference and deduction are quite well-known. If you ask someone what they think of when you mention Mr. Holmes, most responses will, more than likely, involve the words “Elementary, my dear Watson.” This “quote” however is rather misleading. Besides the fact that those words, in that order, were never put to paper by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the statement itself implies a close-friendly relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. However, Watson is less Holmes’s “sidekick” as he is a super-fan who follows Holmes and fawns over his amazing abilities. Holmes is a narcissist whose feelings for Watson can only be compared to the feelings between a rock star and any number of groupies who want to be around them; that is, those feelings stem from a sense of power and superiority over another person, as opposed to being of love or friendship. Watson’s main purpose in Sherlock Holmes’s life is to write of the adventures and cases. He is mainly there to observe and record. He rarely, if ever, contributes to the solution, content to simply listen to Holmes explain everything. Early in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” Holmes displays his mastery of the art of deduction to Watson, and obviously is glad to show off. Watson describes Holmes’s lecture as being said “with the air of a professor lecturing his class”; Holmes explains the “absurdly simple” chain as if he is imparting a great knowledge upon those whose intellects could not possibly match his own. Holmes’s very next action is to present Watson with a note he knows the doctor will not be able to decode. In another story, Watson himself remarks on Holmes’s attitude towards other people. In “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” Watson and Holmes are assisting in an investigation surrounding a young man found dead near the tracks of the
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