Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamlet53
In fairness to Doyle I have always thought that he wrote this to illustrate Holmes' narrow minded devotion to the business of being the worlds greatest deductive detective. No not realistic.
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It's similar to scenes in television and movies, where a character may say something mind bogglingly stupid. The point isn't the particular fact they're being stupid about. The point is that the audience should see the character's stupidity (or in Holmes' case, their willful ignorance). If Doyle just said "Holmes was willfully ignorant of things unrelated to detective work" this would not make the book very interesting. Holmes having this conversation with Watson, demonstrates it and makes it real.
And if you're an author or scriptwriter demonstrating someone's willfull ignorance or stupidity through dialog, you have to pick something everyone in the audience will get. The audience contains people with every level of knowledge and intelligence. You have to get your character under the bar for everyone, not just the more educated members of the audience.
Doyle wasn't writing for the intelligentsia. The Holmes books were entertainment for the masses, in the days before television took over that duty.