The middle passages of The Hound of the Baskervilles are among the most suspenseful in literature in large part because of the unrelieved atmosphere of doom that surrounds the well-drawn, appealing characters of Watson, Sir Henry, and Holmes.
The Hound of the Baskervilles. Previous Themes and Characters. Next Overview. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. The Hound of the Baskervilles gives us the impression that the city of London is basically sitting in the palm of Sherlock Holmes' hand. In London, Holmes has Cartwright, the admiring messenger kid who runs errands for him. He's got art galleries and operas, insider connections with Scotland Yard, and his loyal pal Watson.
He's a local celeb. In fact, when Holmes reflects back on Stapleton's plans, he notes that Stapleton decides to leave London to continue his plot against Sir Henry in Dartmoor because Stapleton "understood that [Holmes] had taken over the case in London, and that therefore there was no chance for him there" Holmes is so influential in London that he actually scares Stapleton away just by starting to look into Sir Henry's case there.
But Dartmoor is totally different from Holmes' London: it's gloomier and more isolated. Between the moaning howls of the Hound, the prehistoric settlements which really do exist , and the close proximity of the famous prison , Dartmoor seems like an excellent setting for a Gothic horror novel.
One of the novel's primary themes is the conflict between rationalism and superstition. Much about the hound case suggest occult explanations, but Holmes steadfastly refuses to consider such possibilities.
It is easy to understand why many turn to such explanations. He was tired of writing the dude. But rather than take a break from Holmes , Conan Doyle decided that Holmes had to die. So in a story titled "The Adventure of the Final Problem," published , Holmes dies after falling off a cliff while battling his arch-nemesis, the evil Professor Moriarty. The end. The Hound of the Baskervilles is a great example of how a murder can be a mystery, as the only apparent answer is an impossible one.
The main conflict in the story is Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack Stapleton. We do not know that Stapleton is the murderer until near the end, but he is the one who killed Charles Baskerville and set the events in motion. Baskerville effect: A fatal heart attack triggered by extreme psychological stress.
The effect is named after Charles Baskerville , a character in the Arthur Conan Doyle story "The Hound of the Baskervilles ," who suffers a fatal heart attack due to extreme psychological stress. The hound is a typical Gothic symbol of the uncontrollable supernatural. It first makes its appearance in the Baskerville legend as a spectral beast, sent from hell to punish Sir Hugo for his debauchery.
The glow on the hound's body and head is actually phosphorus, a preparation applied to it by Stapleton to give the hound an eerie supernatural appearance. Stapleton steals one of Sir Henry's boots to train the hound to be attracted to Sir Henry's scent and then starves the hound to make it more vicious. Contents Chapter 1 Mr. The curse of the Baskervilles is that the hound of the moor hunts down the members of the Baskerville family one by one.
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