How Does Doyle Change The Point Of View Of Writing

Doyle takes a risk by changing the point of view from memory to letters, but it was a risk well taken. By by adapting the point of view, Doyle can limit the amount of information the reader receives and makes it much easier to place in red herrings. The reader could be easily mislead and deceived through these letters, because some of the information given can lead to incorrect suspicions towards certain characters. Doyle makes the reader work hard by limiting the amount of information we receive, forcing the reader to infer much more. For example, the reader may infer that Barrymore could have been the killer because in Chapter 9, he sneaks off in the middle of the night to a remote part of the estate with a candle. But in later chapters he is proved to just be hiding the convict Selden. The letter format limits the amount of information the reader receives, but also gives them a clearer

Doyle had cut off the main information source, because Watson was now communicating through letters. He was looking back on the events, remembering them, and then writing them down. Some clues important to the story could have been easily looked over, and not added into the letter. Doyle leaves out the extra detail that he puts in the other chapters and leaves the reader with the cold, hard, facts. It is much easier to comprehend and follow along the plot through this format, but the reader is challenged through understanding the clues and inferring their meanings. Doyle then does not give us a full entry from the letter, in Chapter 10, the message is only an extract from the diary of Watson. Limiting the amount of information given even more. But even though Doyle does not give the reader Watson’s first reaction to the events, they get his analyzed reaction through writing. As a result, Doyle gives the reader filtered and focused