Marissa Porraz

Professor Haas
Writing 39B
1 June 2014

Thesis: Thesis: The two go together: Holmes brilliance for precise details, deduction, and
observation, go hand in hand with Watsons eager service, loyal partnership, and untrained eye.

The dynamic between Watson and Holmes is set up through a pattern which literary
scholar George Dove describes in A Different Story as a sort of a contract between the reader
and the author, in which the reader is invited to play a guessing game and go on a ride making
their own deductions (6). As the audience, we are able to play this game with the amateur clues
we get from Watsons perspective. Although, Watson is a doctor and an otherwise perceived
intelligent man, Conan Doyle creates Sherlock in a light that both elevates and heightens his
abilities as a consulting detective. As scholar Kirby Farrell describes in his text, Heroism,
Culture, and Dread in The Sign of The Four, Watson represents the commonplace man in
comparison to Holmes. In essence, Holmes is complemented by Watson into a persona Farrell
describes as a fusion of personas called the splitman dynamic (34). In the beginning of the case
in The Sign of the Four, when Holmes produces the poisoned thorn assumed to be the murder
weapon that killed Bartholomew Sholto;, Watson concedes, This is all an insoluble mystery to
me. It grows darker instead of clearer. At which point, Holmes responds, On the contrary, it
clears every instant. I only require a few missing links to have an entirely connected case
(location 761). Within these couple of lines between the characters, the audience has to keep up
with the hidden clues that Holmes easily solves and Watson overlooks. Effectively, it is
throughout the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, we become part of the story as we read, we become a
Watson, a Sherlock Holmes in training, and we are at the service of Holmes as he looks to
Watson for his best guess at an explanation, only to be told we were so close, but not quite.