The Barthes and Doyle Connection

After much confusion and some boredom that I underwent while reading The Structural Analaysis of Narratives by Roland Barthes, I wondered how I would ever connect this to the enjoyable Adventure of the Speckled Band by Arthur Conan Doyle. After much thought and review , the connection hit me. Although Introduction to the Structural... can be difficult to decipher, it is apparent that it has a common bond with The Adventure of the Speckled Band. Barthes's theory and defenition of the structural makeup of narratives is evident in "Speckled Band" in a few ways. First, the story is complex, "eluding all unilateral investigation" (Bartes) The story is multidimensional with clues that serves as a monkeywrench to your attempt to solve the mystery. Also, the story aligns itself with Barthe's theory of narrative structure being similar to Aristotelian poetry, where the characters of the stories are always secondary.