A Case Of Identity

“A Case of Identity” is framed around a conversation between Holmes and Watson about the bizarreness of everyday life, its impenetrable curiosity, and the supremacy of reason as a key to navigating the world: “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent,” says Holmes (225). This statement about life’s strangeness operates as a springboard. It sets up the genre of the story readers are about to embark upon, as this case of disguises and typewritten love letters and false trips to France is definitely a strange one.

However, the statement also announces Holmes’s complexity, in terms of not only temperament but intellectual disposition. Though he largely embodies rationalism, his assertion about the strangeness of life—that its mystery extends the grasp or invention of the mind—undermines that rationalism. Moreover, just as he blends the seemingly contradictory elements of mystery and rationalism, he unites two other opposite realities: inductive and deductive reasoning. While famous for deduction, Holmes more often uses induction. In other words, instead of beginning with hypotheses and testing them against observation, he often begins with observation and arrives at conclusions.

Holmes’s remark about strangeness establishes the very premise of inductive logic: Induction, unlike deduction, begins not with hypothesis but with observation. Precisely because life is stranger than anything humanly conceivable, guesses cannot be made before accumulating data; observation must precede conclusion.

It is Watson who first fumbles with reason. He cites a newspaper headline about spousal abuse and presumes to summarize the situation from his storehouse of previous experience. In a sense, he has a preconceived explanatory narrative for the world in general (i.e., a prematurely embraced hypothesis) and assumes it applies to the specific situation of the news story. This resembles but ultimately differs from deductive reasoning, which does not assume but tests. However, Holmes knows the news story and razes Watson’s guesswork, symbolizing the superiority of his own meticulous methods. Holmes’s inductive method involves hearing all the details, collecting evidence, and asking questions—then comes the time for hypothesizing and verification. That is why the first half of the story consists entirely of dialogue; Holmes learns from Miss Sutherland all the evidence for the case.

Nevertheless, Holmes also indirectly uses a kind of deduction. For example, early in the story, he says to Watson, “[I]t is usually in unimportant matters that there is a field for the observation, and for the quick analysis of cause and effect which gives the charm to an investigation” (226). This is a kind of hypothesis that needs corroboration. And, as the story unfolds, that hypothesis is tested and corroborated (though “charm” isn’t exactly empirical). In playing with both inductive and deductive reasoning, Holmes presents a complex image of the intellect.

Holmes’s attention to detail, which he tries to teach Watson, is a mode of thinking—a lifestyle of the mind—that transcends its application to criminology. This story champions the idea that perfected, multifaceted independent thought is superior to socially prescribed methods of solution. Police assistance is absent from the story; Holmes solves this one on his own, setting a precedent for self-reliance and discipline in facing the world and its injustice. As Holmes teaches Watson, so Conan Doyle attempts to teach readers that everyone is a detective in some regard. Readers are called upon to notice the details in any of a hundred given circumstances and solve life’s perplexing questions with careful thought and analysis.