Sherlock Holmes Isolation

Sherlock Holmes is a truly interesting and captivating character to examine in the context the world around him. Obviously, his intellect sets him apart from the rest of the world, but the way his superior intellect affects his behavior is also fascinating. Time after time he appears to react in a contradictory way to other characters in the book: He avoids emotion at all costs, he doesn’t search for justice, simply to complete the problem and find truth, he doesn’t believe in anything supernatural, and, perhaps most perplexingly, it is in times of isolation that he is the most brilliant. This contradiction to the rest of the characters in the story is what makes Sherlock Holmes such an interesting subject for a novel and Doyle using Sherlock’s

Throughout the story, Holmes calls the case “Interesting, though elementary…curious” (Doyle, 1) and a “most interesting problem” (3), but not once, even after the case has been solved does he seem happy that he has caught a killer, or that he has saved lives. He only refers to the case of the Hound of the Baskervilles as a problem. He doesn’t link justice for the dead or keeping people safe with his work, even when recounting his thought process with Watson several months later. He takes all emotion out of solving the mystery and turns it into a type of math problem. He looks only at facts and figures, not at the human motivations behind the act which creates an environment and method exclusive to Sherlock. Because this is such a unique process, and because of Holmes’ brilliance, Sherlock is required to do this alone. His mind works in such a specific way that he doesn’t communicate his entire process to others. After the conclusion of the case, bursting with curiosity, Watson notices, “One of Sherlock Holmes’s defects—if, indeed, one may call it a defect—was that he was exceedingly loath to communicate his full plans to any other person until the instant of their fulfillment,”

The rest of the characters in the story seem to warn of isolation, but Sherlock thrives when he is unaccompanied. On the BBC television show, Sherlock occasionally goes to his “Mind Palace” where he can remember the most minute details and solve the unsolvable. When he goes to his mind palace the rest of the characters just wait until Sherlock is has solved it and then he moves on to the next thing on his to-do list, without explaining to the rest of his team what he concluded. At the end of the story Watson even remarks, “he would never permit cases to overlap, and that his clear and logical mind would not be drawn from its present work…” (15). Watson also notices, “Sherlock Holmes had, in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching his mind at will,” (5). These are rather noteworthy skill because it indicates that even the inside of Sherlock’s mind isolates different subjects, just as he isolates himself in the