“A Study in Scarlet” written by A. Conan Doyle
The book itself was captivating like many murder mystery books and definitely presented clear imagery throughout the text. Along with finding the text easy to follow, the investigation had intriguing cliff hangers and twists that made you want to read more. The book followed a layout in which Sherlocks story was told first and then the reasons behind the crime were told second in part 2. At first, I was confused by this and it took me a while to understand how part 2 was related but once I understood the connection I really enjoyed this layout. It made me fully change my opinion on the killer and it opened my eyes up to the concept about how important the whole story is and not to judge anyone before knowing their past.
The first half of the text built the idea of revenge to serve justice to those who have done wrong. From the presentation of the word “rache” in the text, meaning revenge in german. We learn how justice is incorporated because the victims, in the eyes of the murderer, had committed an unjust action making them guilty and deserving of death in the killer’s eyes.
Through many stories, this idea of revenge can come hand in hand with the idea of justice because many people believe that getting revenge is getting justice. I personally would not consider this to be true because revenge is much like fighting fire with fire or similar to the phrase, “two wrongs do not make a right.” Yet peoples connection to the unjust act, in this case, Jefferson Hope losing his loved one, dictates how he sees justice. I learn this from the text because in part one I viewed Jefferson Hope as the bad guy, the guy who had committed the crime of murder and I only saw him in the wrong and not the two victims, but when we are fed background information and are told things from the other side, in part 2 of the book, I find my whole perspective-changing. I felt bad for the character of Jefferson Hope, I developed hate towards the men killed, Dribbler and Strangerson, and I even started to see it much like Jefferson did, that they deserved to die. Therefore showing the power of perspective of justice in such a situation. The book states “what he knew to be justice” showing that one man’s justice varies from the next. If we had lived through these events that Jefferson Hope did then our opinion of what justice is can be easily changed or dictated by hate, anger and grief, which is what all of part 2 develops within the reader through understanding Jefferson’s perspective. This further shows how exposure to these emotions of hate, anger and grief can take over your mind, fuel your revenge for something and completely change your view on the world and the actions you take. Like they did for Jefferson, his life did not continue from that point onwards for his hate was so overpowering that even though he was living he was not moving on, as his head was only focused on getting justice and revenge. For the rest of his life, he thought of nothing else other than killing the two men because in his eyes the world would never be fair until they were dead.
This caused me to reflect on how you must be careful with these emotions and how much you let them take over your mind because if you allow them to they will consume your thoughts like an addiction as it did for Jefferson. “There is no satisfaction in vengeance unless the offender has time to realize who it is that strikes him, and why retribution has come upon him.” – Jefferson Hope.
It makes me question the system of crime, for did Jefferson Hope really deserve to be made out as a bad guy? When the two men were far worse than him and all he was doing was solving a crime much like a detective would just in his own way. To me, it shows that the system of law is not the only force of justice in this world. Justice is always made out to be something obtained by a judge or given by police officers or detectives but what I learnt from this text is that the law only takes credit for justice and uses it as a way of making the law seem like the good guys.
Jefferson Hope states in the final pages of the book, “You may consider me to be a murderer, but I hold that I am just as much of an officer of justice as you are.” After this and looking back into the book I see how in some sense he is correct in saying he is no different. All Jefferson Hope has done is work to gain the justice that was never served. He trusts the universal power that he believes to be justice in many ways, such as giving himself the equal chance of death with the 50/50 chance of taking the wrong pill to prove that his doings of gaining justice were really correct. How would I feel if I thought justice would never be served unless I took matters into my own hands. If I had no faith in the justice system that we have or so no hope of anything ever being done. Would I be tempted to take matters into my own hands? Luckily I live in a country with a robust legal system and a police force to call when needed. So I feel secure that I have a place to go to if needed, rather than take the law into my own hands. Unfortunately, not all parts of the world are the same in this area. Or within gangs in many parts of the world, it is considered the norm to deal with things themselves and take the law into their own hands. In 2006 58% of deaths in L.A, (newsweek Jan 2007) were gang-related.
Jefferson accepts his own death as his punishment in order to balance justice in the world. It saddens me because through reading this book you know the whole story and you don’t see Jefferson as a bad guy but in the end, but for him to be made out like that by the law seems unfair because all he was doing was making the world a more fair place again when the law could not. I admit that I was led to see him as the criminal in part 1. I saw him as the murderer and that any murderer is evil. But like I previously said after reading part 2 it made me realise how important the whole story is. In a modern-day courtroom we have the lawyers for the defendant and the prosecutor. Each is tasked with presenting each side of the story to help with the decision making of the jury. To give the full picture so they can ideally make a decision based on information from both points of view. Holmes would call this ‘the science of deduction”
My perspective was changed and I then felt sorry for Jefferson Hope and in some sense, I too, believed that Dribbler and Stragerson deserved death more than he did. Yet this was not shown to the public eye and Hope was made out to be the bad guy. I believe this can be seen in the real world, how often does the news only tell us what they want us to hear? They don’t want us to know that in any way that murder can be an act of true justice, for that could spread the wrong image. So instead in our world the everyday people who read or watch the news can be fed what the people of higher authority want us to hear or what is perceived as the right message. We see people on TV who are being convicted as drug addicts for example, and we frown because that is the acceptable reaction to hearing such things. We are told they made the wrong decisions in life. But sometimes you look into that person’s background and you find that the reason for their drug usage is they had no other choice, they were born into that and that was all they were taught with little opportunity to know any better. Then with that knowledge, we feel bad, we feel like they shouldn’t be in the wrong because when you know the whole story you see that maybe it isn’t true or they had no choice and were forced to do something. It has made me think about that if we/I want to own an individual opinion it’s important to not always go off what we have been told to believe or what we see on the surface of a situation but we must make our opinions based on what we know for a fact and find out the real background story because it the whole story that shows the real truth and the whole story. As Holmes puts it “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”