Reason Versus Fantasy in Conan Doyles The Hound of the Baskervilles - Book Report/Review Example

Holmes is a clear and incisive thinker, who abhors superstition. The family of Baskervilles has a legend attached to it, the legend of an evil ancestor, Sir Hugo Baskerville. According to the legend, an enormous hell hound which killed him and which still haunts the head of the family who lives in the estate and kills him. When Dr. Mortimer reads out the legend to Holmes and asks him whether he did not find it interesting, Holmes replies, "To a collector of fairy tales",(Doyle 18) showing his contempt for such cock-and-bull stories.

But the effects of the legend on other men of science like Dr. Watson and Dr. Mortimer is quite the opposite. When Mortimer recounts that he saw footprints at the scene of the crime, Holmes asks him, "'A man's or a woman's' Dr.Mortimer looked at us strangely for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered, 'Mr.Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!'" (Doyle 24) As for Watson, he writes, "I confess that at these words a shudder passed through me."(p.25)Arthur Conan Doyle made his Sherlock Holmes a man with incisive thinking powers who would hardly believe in the supernatural, while Doyle's own convictions about things supernatural were quite the reverse.

His own conviction is revealed in the words of Dr. Mortimer in this conversation between Dr.Mortimer and the detective. Mortimer says,"'There is a realm in which the most acute and most experienced of detectives is helpless.' 'You mean that the thing is supernatural'" (P. 26) Although Conan Doyle believed in the supernatural and the psychic, as a man of science, he also had complete faith in the scientific principles. The vigor with which Sherlock Holmes pursues his science-based theories reflects the convictions of his creator.

Sending Watson to Dartmoor with Baskerville, Holmes himself goes there secretly to watch Stapleton whom he suspects. He stays in a hut on the moor for some time. In Watson's words, "He was thin and worn, but clear and alert, his keen face bronzed by the sun and roughened by the wind." (p. 128) Holmes' keen brain had already recognized the murderer and anticipated his plans.