Watson's Role as a Narrator in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes

Watson’s narration encompasses the collective stories of the three main male characters and their characterization of Irene Adler. Therefore, his failure is equally theirs and points to a larger failure of the masculine discourse to properly identify and codify the Woman. With the theory of optics in mind as well as the narrative structural patterns in secrete histories as a guide, we can conclude that Watson, and therefore the masculine discourse, fails as an accurate observer because the information he obtains not only is unreliable, but stems from the misperceptions of the masculine discourse.

Although varied, a majority of secret histories have an active narrator, which provides a running commentary throughout. Hattige provides a perfect example of such commentary with an extensive preface from the translator. The text as it is framed for the English reader has a preface which presents questions as to the validity. As the initial comment on the story, the translator describes one glaring problems with narrator reliability. The first is the assertion made that the editor merely translated a novel he had read. In this way, the actual author is once removed from the narration and is therefore shielded from attack and censor. What this also accomplishes is the room for error credited between the author and the translator. The preface even admits that the translator might not have completely translated the story successfully. He states “how well I have done it, let the Reader judg.” This statement suggests the possibility of mistranslation which can have immense ramifications as words and phrases mistranslated significant changes to the meaning.

The narrator in Hattige transitions from the preface’s “translator” to ...

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... Letter from H- G-g, Esq." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17.2 (2005): 207-30. Print.

Earla Wilputte argues that Haywood’s letter is a parody rather than an earnest petition from a Jacobite supporter. She responds ota general tread if criticism which identifies manley as a Tory and therefore sees her writing as supportive of the Jacobites. She also takes up Paula Backschudei’s arguement about Haywood’s ironic narrator. Wilputte supports her argument by using secondary experts onparod and primary document from Haywood’s writings. her argument is somewhat successful as she does show some contradictory aspects as to the primary documents concerning the prince and her story’s account of him. However, she does not sufficiently address the oppositional ideas concerning the earnestness of the tale or what motivation she might have had for writing against the Jacobites.