Reason and emotion — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Reason and emotion
Themes
What you need to know
How Conan Doyle explores reason against emotion, through Holmes's science of deduction and Watson's feelings across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace', 'Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth', 'A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem', 'Holmes alone could rise superior to petty influences', 'while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty', 'I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment'.
Holmes's cold reasoning against Watson's feelings, and whether the novel finally values reason or love.
