For a paper in my Communication 101 course, I had to choose a person and dissect his/her personality using the tools of semiotics (see the paper below) that we had learned in the class. I was a budding young Sherlockian then who found no one's personality half so interesting as Holmes. My professor was a jolly good sport to let me choose Holmes, but as he was not a Sherlockian, I did not play the Game (of pretending Holmes is real and Doyle irrelevant) in my paper.
When I finished the paper, I was rather over-pleased with myself and posted the essay on my website, with some expansions. Moreover, I styled the essay in a hideous color scheme, which, heaven bless him, the Foxhound at first retained when he brought it over to his Holmes site; fortunately, the Foxhound saw the light before I did, and has re-styled his website since then. Now that I have room for the essay upon my own site again, I am taking the opportunity to revise and expand it. As before, the citations and quotations are done in MLA style, save that, in citing Doyle's stories, I give the four-letter standard abbreviation of the story in question, instead of the page numbers from the Doubleday edition that I used when writing the essay. There are varying editions of the canon, and each reader ought to choose which canon they want to consult.
Paper last revised: 4 July, 2001.
Semiotics is a branch of communication concerned with the signs and codes of varied objects, and semiotics is defined rather simplistically in some dictionaries as "semantics". But semiotics is not merely about analyzing linguistic meaning; it can tackle many concepts such as casual speech, commercial advertisements, gender relations, and social hierarchy. Such cultural phenomena can be understood as arbitrary conventions and "texts" that can be studied under a microscope. Semiotic analysis of these "texts" can provide a fresh perspective that permits the discovery of underlying meanings that are normally obscured in everyday use. Viewing a particular personality in this way can also reveal how the truly individual signs and codes of a person function to express that unique identity to the world at large.
Though Sherlock Holmes, hero of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's mystery stories, is fictional, his entire persona as a character may be analyzed as if he were real. (Given the longevity of Doyle's creation and the "reality" he has attained in certain readers' minds, this would seem justified.) Also, a body of fiction such as Doyle's sixty Holmes stories is largely geared toward the detailed development of character, and it lends itself to point-by-point analysis. Let us see what a semiotic analysis of Holmes's personality can reveal about him.
In semiotics, signs are like a vocabulary of communication signals which someone uses, and each sign exemplifies some aspect of the person who owns them. The signs that belong to Holmes are things somehow connected to him that he employs for meaning, even unintentionally, in his relations with the world beyond himself. These items include his appearance, his possessions, his reactions to other people, and his speech. These signs can be distinguished under the categorical terms of Charles Sanders Peirce: icon, index, and symbol.
Icons physically resemble their source and derive meaning from that resemblance. In the novel A Study in Scarlet, Watson first describes Holmes this way:
In height he was rather other six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing ... and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. (Doyle STUD, Chapt 2)
A similar, though not identical, reading is given of Sherlock Holmes's brother Mycroft, whose "face ... had preserved something of the sharpness of expression which was so remarkable in that of his brother. His eyes, which were of a peculiarly light, watery gray, seemed to always retain that far-away, introspective look which I had only observed in Sherlock's when he was exerting his full powers" (Doyle GREE).
This familial resemblance is important because Mycroft differs from Sherlock in a few key ways: Mycroft is older, possesses greater powers of observation, weighs much more, and is more withdrawn from society as a whole. Mycroft lives a very confined life, habitually dividing his time among only three places, his home, his work, and his Diogenes Club (Doyle GREE). Sherlock asserts that "If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived", but some indolence or lack of ambition renders Mycroft incapable of the legwork that is required of a detective (Doyle GREE). Thus, Doyle uses the physical and intellectual resemblance between Sherlock and Mycroft to sharpen the contrast of their different dispositions and professions. Having Mycroft serve as an icon of his brother enables Doyle to highlight the exact qualities and skills that make his hero Sherlock Holmes such a great and practical detective.
Doyle, though, did not always need such a familial resemblance to achieve his purposes. Other icons for Sherlock Holmes can be found in the haunting parallels that the stories draw between Holmes and his enemies. For instance, this description of the arch-criminal Moriarty--
He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. (Doyle FINA)
--is in many ways interchangeable with this description of Holmes:
He loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumour or suspicion of unsolved crime. (Doyle CARD)
Holmes and Moriarty are so similar, in fact, and Holmes expresses such unabashed admiration for Moriarty's genius in "The Final Problem", that one might wonder whether he envies Moriarty in some way, especially since Holmes remarks on occasion that "I would have made a highly efficient criminal" (Doyle CHAS). Perhaps Doyle is hinting that Holmes, had he chosen to do so, could have been a Moriarty as well?
Another criminal with whom Holmes is identified is Count Negretto Sylvius, a lion hunter and a jewel thief. In "The Mazarin Stone," when the Count asks Holmes why he risks bodily assault or worse by prying into Sylvius's business, Holmes counters by asking why the Count formerly hunted lions. Puzzled, Sylvius answers:
"Why? The sport--the excitement--the danger!"
"And, no doubt, to free the country from a pest?"
"Exactly!"
"My reasons in a nutshell!" (Doyle MAZA)
Rather than characterizing his detective cases as being pure intellectual puzzles for him to dispassionately analyze, Holmes here identifies them as tantalizing pursuits of daring and nerve, making them strikingly click with Sylvius's pastime. This hunting metaphor carries into other Doyle stories. When Holmes is "on the prowl" he is often literally described as a hunting animal--as, most often, a hound. In "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" Watson relates how Holmes is "transformed" by the scene of the crime.
His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him that a question or remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick, impatient snarl in reply.... Sometimes Holmes would hurry on, sometimes stop dead, and once he made quite a little detour into the meadow.... He ran round, like a dog who is picking up a scent.... (Doyle BOSC)
This repeated characterization of Holmes as a sleuth-hound or blood-hound is an inspired metaphor to convey Holmes's intensity and single-mindedness when he investigates a case.
Finally, the stories contain another intriguing icon for Holmes. Not entirely in jest, Watson discovers another person who strongly resembles the detective, yet remains quite distinct in identity; the man is Holmes himself!
In his singular character the dual nature alternately asserted itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally predominated in him. (Doyle REDH)
Holmes's dual nature serves to explain the many contradicting traits that Doyle endowed him with, such as his laziness vs. his fits of energy, his orderly mind vs. his untidy sitting-room, and his scientific nature vs. his poetic and artistic tendencies. In The Sign of the Four, Holmes quotes some lines of Goethe's Xenian which aptly describe himself. The German translates as "It's a pity that Nature made only one person out of you, for there was material for a good man and a rogue" (Tracy 140).
Thus Doyle, very ingeniously, provides several icons to surround and mirror Sherlock Holmes, and each of their reflections add significantly to how Holmes himself is perceived by the reader. The detective is almost malleable in identity, able to blur the distinctions between himself and other personalities.
Unlike an icon, an index does not have to resemble its source, but it is strongly related to the source. An index is a sign whose existence is inevitably tied to the object it represents. The whole of Sherlock Holmes's Baker Street residence is an index of him, since it in fact has no existence without him. In real life, there never was an address of 221B Baker Street (not in Victorian times), and the London museum that claims that address in modern times is, quite naturally, a shrine to Sherlock Holmes (Tracy 22). Thus Holmes in a sense created 221B.
As for 221B within the context of the stories, the rooms clearly serve as representations of Holmes's unique identity. Though Holmes rents the place from his landlady Mrs. Hudson, whatever feminine character that she might have originally given to the rooms is eradicated once Holmes (and his fellow lodger Watson) transform the place into a bachelor's flat. Not just any old bachelor, either; the bachelor. Holmes's rooms almost scream out loud, "Holmes lives here!" due to his thorough and overwhelming influence on the decor. The sitting-room overflows with chemicals from his laboratory experiments and stacks of papers from his cases (Doyle MUSG). Bullet holes even spell out VR, initials for Victoria Regina (Queen Victoria in Latin), on his wall. Watson admits that he is not that tidy himself, but:
when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantlepiece, then I began to give myself virtuous airs. (Doyle MUSG)
No one can blame Watson for that! In general, Holmes's rooms are slovenly, and his "every [bedroom] wall was papered with the portraits of celebrated criminals" (Starrett 48). Rarely does a description of 221B ever reveal Watson's possessions or lodging habits in detail, as if they were embarrassingly small and ordinary compared to Holmes's eccentricities, so there can be no doubt that Holmes is the dominant personality being evoked by the appearance and contents of 221B (Doyle CARD).
Among other things whose existence depend upon Holmes, his acting roles are surely worth mention. As a detective, he often finds it useful to work using a disguise or alias in order to get information or solve his cases. But this is no mere play acting, no haphazard, slap-together costume of dark glasses and a mustache. Watson tells us that "His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with each fresh part he assumed" (Doyle SCAN). The stories always emphasize the artistic precision of Holmes's thespian talents. "The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime" (Doyle SCAN).
So Holmes actively participates in the creation of several indices around him, whether it be his home or the expedient characters he creates for himself, such as Escott the plumber, Captain Basil, or a man betting on the origin of a group of Christmas geese (Doyle CHAS, BLAC, BLUE).
Unlike icons and indices, symbols have only a tangential connection to their source. Symbols are signs whose arbitrary meanings are defined by convention. A multitude of symbols stand for Sherlock Holmes when they need not. Holmes's pipe is an ordinary object that any smoking man could have owned. His dressing-gown in which he often appears is similarly typical of the period. Nor does Holmes have any exclusive claim over violins. Nero, surely, is more notorious for having played one performance than Holmes for having played for a lifetime.
The famed deerstalker cap so often associated with Holmes is derived merely from a drawing of the detective by Sidney Paget, not the text of any Doyle story (Tracy xiv). Similarly, the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" comes from Basil Rathbone's popular portrayal of Holmes, and does not appear in the stories themselves (Tracy xv).
These symbols for Holmes, accepted metonyms for his character, life, and world, are the result of long habit and tradition. Even a London fog or a hansom cab may signify Sherlock Holmes if his readers choose to designate such a meaning.
Whereas the signs of Holmes serve as a kind of vocabulary, the codes of Holmes serve as syntax and grammar. The codes are the systematic rules by which Holmes operates his signs and expresses himself to other people. Holmes is often stereotypically perceived as communicating and conforming entirely with the stuffy and rigid code that is held to be Victorian. As an instance of this, on "Elementary, My Dear Data," an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the android Data played Holmes as a slave to fact and pretentious speech. Such a reading of the detective misses the mark about Holmes's fundamentally unconventional nature.
Holmes is more complex than any popular stereotype. How can Watson so often describe Holmes as having a "singular character" if he were but an ordinary Victorian (Doyle REDH, COPP)? A careful scrutiny of the stories shows that Holmes actually lives according to a code of deviation from the norm, of being an unusual and unorthodox individual--or a "Bohemian" as his author puts it (Doyle SCAN). Let us examine five major codes that sharply separate Holmes from the average Late Victorian man.
When Holmes deals with the upper-class, he goes very much against accepted Victorian etiquette, especially since his profession as a private consulting detective hardly makes him their social equal. Holmes often displays an almost arrogant lack of deference to his noble or privileged clients. Sometimes they frankly amuse him; other times his attitude toward them is that "Some of you rich men have to be taught that all the world cannot be bribed into condoning your offences" (Doyle THOR).
In "Scandal in Bohemia," for example, Holmes proceeds to immediately see through the King of Bohemia's disguise, pick apart his Majesty's case without even letting the King express his astonishment, suggest that Irene Adler is "on a very different level to your Majesty", and finally refuse the King's offered payment in favor of a personal item which Irene Adler Norton had specifically left for the King (Doyle SCAN). When Lord Robert Walsingham de Vere St. Simon casually remarks that Holmes has probably never handled a case for so grand a client as he, Holmes cuts him down by mentioning a recent case with the King of Scandinavia and by also delicately reminding the shocked St. Simon of the inappropriateness of his asking Holmes to divulge any details of that case; he forces Lord St. Simon to "beg your pardon" twice (Doyle NOBL). This is the kind of insolence that most people dare not show toward the upper classes, especially if being paid by them.
Even when Holmes likes his privileged clients, he still takes liberties with their health or their peace of mind. In "The Naval Treaty" adventure, a mischievous Holmes badly startles Percy Phelps of the Foreign Office by serving to that nerve-wracked official a breakfast platter containing the missing treaty (Doyle NAVA). Without explaining his plan to his client, Holmes endangers the very life of Sir Henry Baskerville when he sets a trap for the deadly Hound of the Baskervilles (Doyle HOUN, Chapt 14). When a top-secret government letter inexplicably returns to its rightful place after having been stolen, Holmes will not tell his client Lord Bellinger exactly how he recovered the letter, only replying cryptically that "We also have our diplomatic secrets" (Doyle SECO).
Thus Holmes often strains the detective-to-client relationship, apparently for no reason other than that he can. Finally, Watson describes Holmes's ultimate snub of the upper class:
So unworldly was he--or so capricious--that he frequently refused his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal to his sympathies, while he would devote weeks of most intense application to the affairs of some humble client whose case presented those strange and dramatic qualities which appealed to his imagination and challenged his ingenuity. (Doyle BLAC)
Besides Holmes's atypical behavior with wealthy and noble clients, Holmes is also decidedly nonconformist when it comes to the law. As a private detective unconnected to the official police force, Holmes seems to presume that it is his right to occasionally take the law into his own hands, thereby circumventing both the police and the British courts. He chooses to let some guilty criminals go free, as if he had the moral, rather than the legal, authority to pardon them. For example, Holmes does not expose a dying John Turner as a murderer, a pathetic James Ryder as a jewel thief, an anonymous woman--whom Holmes later recognized--as the murderer of her blackmailer, and a sailor named Captain Crocker as the killer of his beloved's abusive husband (Doyle BOSC, BLUE, CHAS, ABBE). In Captain Crocker's case, Holmes actually stages a mock trial in which Crocker is acquitted by Watson, standing in for a jury, and Holmes, standing in for a judge.
While some Victorians may have agreed with Holmes's sense of justice, especially when reading the stories, most likely they did not emulate Holmes to the point of actually taking the law into their own hands. His unorthodox methods were just that, unorthodox.
Another point of difference is that Holmes did not share his fellow Victorians' outlook on the world around them. In an age where Britain held global power and was a prime example of modern technology and civilization, an Englishman could naturally walk about with great patriotism for his country and great optimism for the future. Watson, surely, is a representative of this type of citizen. In contrast, Holmes is a man that views the world rather cynically at best. Where Watson sees a "fresh and beautiful" countryside with scattered houses, Holmes thinks only "of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there" (Doyle COPP).
In more domestic realms, Victorians held a rosy-colored sentimentality concerning love and marriage in its ideal forms. Domestic life was meant to be tranquil and happy, due to angelic wives who saw to their husbands' every comfort. Women in general were symbolic of innocence, goodness, and emotion. Watson, who actually marries a client of Holmes named Mary Morstan (Doyle SIGN, Chapt 12), admiringly describes the beauty and other charms of women throughout the stories, especially damsels in distress.
Holmes, on the other hand, is "not a whole-souled admirer of womankind" and readily admits to it (Doyle VALL, Chapt 6). Where Watson has a tendency to be easily impressed by a pretty face, Holmes claims that "women are never to be entirely trusted" (Doyle SIGN, Chapt 9) and tells Watson of a "winning woman" who turned out to be a poisoner of children (Doyle SIGN, Chapt 2). Moreover, Holmes is fiercely unsentimental and unromantic with regard to love. "He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer" (Doyle SCAN). Most significantly, in an age when marriage was expected of most people who could afford it, Holmes remains a bachelor.
As for emotions in general, Holmes strives to distinguish himself from other people by living his life according to a strictly scientific, logical, and unemotional code of behavior. Yet at the same time that Holmes professes this code, he often undermines it by acting emotionally. Clearly, Holmes's use of emotion is the most complex of all his codes of communication, and deserves lengthy discussion.
Unlike Data, the Star Trek: The Next Generation android who played Holmes in a holodeck episode, Holmes is not literally a machine incapable of feeling emotion. As long as he is human, he must possess emotion. Men, both in Holmes's time and in ours, may be raised to withhold overt emotional displays in an effort to be masculine and aloof, but Holmes goes to such extremes to act inhuman that Watson accuses him of being "an automaton--a calculating machine" (Doyle SIGN, Chapt 2). Holmes defines himself in rather severe terms too: "I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix" (Doyle MAZA).
Holmes justifies cutting emotions out of his life because emotions would interfere with his reason and his objective judgment in his cases; "whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things" (Doyle SIGN, Chapt 12). Consequently, he frequently criticizes Watson's chronicles of his cases for being romanticized and embellished by unnecessary drama. Holmes asserts that "detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner" (Doyle SIGN, Chapt 1). Holmes clearly views suppressing emotion as a requirement for his career as a detective, as essential to him as his knowledge of criminal history or his ability to track footprints.
Holmes's efforts to deny his emotions ostensibly work, and Watson calls him "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen" (Doyle SCAN). Stamford, a mutual acquaintance of Holmes and Watson, comments on Holmes's scientific "cold-bloodedness" that could motivate him easily to experiment with poisons on other people or on himself, simply to study the effects (Doyle STUD, Chapt 1). Watson confesses that "sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was preëminent in intelligence" (Doyle GREE).
However, one of the great contradictions in Holmes's personality is that his code of unemotional logic often gets violated by an opposite code of emotional expression. With a moodiness resembling that of a bipolar person, Holmes can swing through emotions at the drop of a hat, or also instantly resume his aloof "red-Indian composure which had made so many regard him as a machine rather than a man" (Doyle CROO).
John Dickson Carr points out that "we can scarcely dip into the stories anywhere without finding Holmes telling us how unemotional he is, and in the next moment behaving more chivalrously--especially towards women--than Watson himself" (263). For example, when Mrs. Stapleton is tied up by her husband to keep her from foiling his plot of murder, Holmes and Watson find her and release her. Upon seeing a mark of abuse on her, Holmes cries with outrage "The brute!" as if he were any other Victorian man moved to protect a helpless woman (Doyle HOUN, Chapt 14). Moreover, he also apparently disregards his personal rule against trusting women when he asks Annie Harrison and Mrs. Hudson for crucial help in setting traps for criminals (Doyle NAVA, EMPT). Through such unexpected behavior, Holmes somewhat softens his usual, almost misogynist, attitude to women.
Holmes reveals emotion in other contexts too. His mixture of hurt pride and self-deprecating laughter after losing the trail of a suspect is an instance of Holmes's very human response to a notable and early reminder of his fallibility (Doyle STUD, Chapt 5). During the Baskerville case, Holmes for a moment mistakes a corpse on the moor for his client and clearly voices both horror and self-blame for the tragedy. Suddenly, though, Holmes becomes deliriously giddy with relief once he discovers that the corpse is in fact not his client, but an escaped convict:
Now [Holmes] was dancing and laughing and wringing my hand. Could this be my stern, self-contained friend? These were hidden fires, indeed! (Doyle HOUN, Chapt 12)
Holmes similarly loses his self-containment when Watson is wounded in "The Three Garridebs" adventure. To his friend, Holmes cries, "You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!" and to the man who shot Watson, Holmes declares, "If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive" (Doyle 3GAR). Such display of raw loyalty and concern certainly makes an impression on Watson, so used to Holmes's "cold mask" rather than his "great heart" (Doyle 3GAR).
Further evidence of Holmes's capacity for emotion is shown in his almost childish love for keeping people in suspense until the very end of a case. Watson observes that:
One of Sherlock Holmes's defects ... was that he was exceedingly loath to communicate his full plans to any other person until the instant of their fulfilment. (Doyle HOUN, Chapt 14)
He jealously guards the solution to a mystery, or even the method of capturing a criminal, just so that he can astonish Watson, clients, and policemen alike with his final revelation (Doyle TWIS, SPEC, EMPT, RETI). For example, Holmes displays his taste for showmanship during "The Six Napoleons" when, like a magician, he reveals a valuable stolen pearl to Watson and Lestrade. In response to this dramatic flourish, they break out into applause, and a flattered Holmes blushes and bows to them, momentarily betraying "his human love for admiration and applause" (Doyle SIXN).
Holmes also finds ample artistic outlet for his emotions in music, whether played by himself or by others. Watson observes that Holmes often composes on his violin in an introspective manner, with varying results. "Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy. Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him" (Doyle STUD, Chapt 2). In addition, Holmes avidly attends concert performances, where he may leisurely enjoy his passion for music (Doyle REDH).
So, despite Holmes's protests of living purely as a cold reasoning machine, he in fact demonstrates considerable depth and range of emotion. However, on the darker side of Holmes's emotional spectrum, there are frequent times that he sinks into a jaded and often bitter melancholy.
Stand at the window there. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them? Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon the earth. (Doyle SIGN, Chapt 1)
This distaste for "commonplace" life causes Holmes to seek out unusual cases for relief (Doyle SPEC). Like an artistic genius or philosopher grown weary of the world, he laments that, "My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence" (Doyle REDH). After Holmes concludes "The Cardboard Box" mystery--a physically and emotionally gruesome case involving adultery, rage, and dismemberment--he soliloquies like a Hamlet:
What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever. (Doyle CARD)
And again, Holmes delivers moody pronouncements about mortal existence:
But is not all life pathetic and futile? ... We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands in the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow--misery. (Doyle RETI)
Throughout his career, Holmes periodically exhibits a pessimism on the verge of clinical depression, as if all his fame, his detective successes, and his riches from wealthy clients are not enough to make him content with his life or the world around him. He possesses a constant restlessness and yearning for challenge. "My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built" (Doyle WIST). This perpetual need for intellectual stimulation is the cause of Holmes's occasional indulgence in doses of cocaine:
Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with the artificial stimulants. (Doyle SIGN, Chapt 1)
Watson of course discourages Holmes's use of cocaine, and in later years is able to "wean" Holmes off the drug, but Holmes's craving for rewarding cases and for villainous criminals like Moriarty never abates (Doyle MISS). Holmes's behavior almost suggests that he became a detective for selfish, emotional reasons, rather than for a selfless, idealistic ambition to eradicate crime and further the interests of justice, an ambition that his more objective self endorses strongly in "The Final Problem":
I tell you, Watson, in all seriousness, that if I could beat [Moriarty], if I could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had reached its summit, and I should be prepared to turn to some more placid line of life ... and to concentrate my attention upon my chemical researches. (Doyle FINA)
Only three years after expressing this noble sentiment to Watson and claiming that his detective career would end (either in death or retirement) once he defeated Moriarty for good, Holmes returns to detective investigation and resumes his former life (Doyle EMPT). Ending his career prematurely is apparently easier said than done. Moreover, within just months of returning, Holmes complains that, although society has benefited from Moriarty's death, London crime has become uninteresting without the villain and Holmes feels a void in his life (Doyle NORW). Clearly, when his old restlessness strikes him, Holmes can become temporarily more concerned with his own self-fulfillment than with the good of the nation.
This particular conflict between ideal goals and selfish interests points to an explanation of Holmes's complex relationship with emotion. Part of him strives to deny his emotions, while the other part validates and embraces his emotions, whatever light or dark mood they may represent. A fundamental division splits Holmes between his conviction that he must be absolutely rational in order to succeed as a detective, and his competing desire to express the basic humanity that he has in common with all other people, especially Watson.
The signs and codes of Sherlock Holmes that we have discussed have allowed us to dissect and navigate through all the facets of Holmes's personality. The icons, indices, and symbols make up a verbal and nonverbal vocabulary that Holmes can manipulate in his communication with himself and others. The five codes that Holmes employs--defiance of class system, toying with his clients, passing judgment, lack of Victorian sentiment, and ambivalence with emotion--distinguish him from typical men of his era and define him as an unconventional and complex individual.
Semiotic analysis has helped us to discover the subtleties and the driving principle behind Holmes's unique identity--the conflict between his rational head and his emotional heart about how to live his life. Will he be a machine today, or a human being? Will he pursue his current investigation for the sake of public justice, or for personal satisfaction? Will he pedantically lecture Watson to stick to the facts, or will he allow his emotions to show and simply treat him as a good friend? Holmes, consciously or not, makes these kind of decisions continually, and also negotiates and compromises as necessary to incorporate both aspects of himself into his life. All the internal pieces in combination create the whole person that he presents to the world publicly, and to himself privately. Every time Holmes engages the external world, he communicates who he is through his words and actions. To comprehend the meaning of all his contradictions and eccentricities, one simply needs to both see, and observe.