The Role of the Family in Conan Doyle's Fiction Alexander Potako College

Sherlock Holmes can be defined as a special character in all the aspect; he is loved by the readers due to the outstanding personal features and intelligence. The plots of the short stories about him can be defined as the extremely attractive due to the way how Doyle understood people and their relations. The role of the family cannot be determined as a central one in the short stories devoted to the detective activity of Sherlock Holmes in London. At the same time, it can provide a lot of additional information both about the personality of the main character and about the specificity of people of the particular epoch. Despite the fact that each story is individual in the aspect of characters, ties, and plot, it is possible to define the tendency in the way how the author introduced the family ties in his fiction. The way how Holmes perceived the notion of family might be contrasted with the common one, and this contrast was the other way to emphasize the uniqueness of this character.

A typical way of perceiving a family as the indispensable attribute of the happy life did not work for Sherlock Holmes, and it made him different even from his best friend. At the same time, the author did not detract the role and importance of...