Reading this last paragraph, it seems that not even David knows what will happen next in his life. The idea of having hope that something positive will happen in his life now. Or Giovanni won't be executed is weighing him down because even he knows that isn't realistic. Since the ending is so ambiguous I personally took David tearing the envelope Jacques sent him slowly as him trying to start over, but when he threw it in the wind as he was walking away the wind blows it back to him. Making me believe that even though he wants to start over and forget what has happened he won't be able to move forward because something in his past will keep bringing him down. I also believe that the reason why Baldwin made the ending so ambiguous is because during that time maybe he didn’t know what to do next or how to move on. It was said that Giovanni’s room was based off of actual events that happened to Baldwin before he starting writing this book. Baldwin was in a love affair with a man named Lucien Happersberger who ended up marrying a women and that’s why the book is dedicated to Lucien.

I tagged an article where Baldwin talks about Giovanni's Room and what it means to him as well as a very short clip of an interview with Baldwin.

In The Sign of Four Doyle has many themes through out the book. One of them I believe to be injustice and justice because you see something happen to each character that is in some way unjust. For example, Mary Morstan not knowing about her father's death or Bartholomew Sholto being killed in the cross fire of Small stealing the treasure by Tonga. Even though Bartholomew never betrayed Small and wasn't even connected to what happened to Small. I think Doyle does this balance between what is right and wrong because during this time period people were faced/charged with many things that weren't their fault. As well as the fact that it was very common for private individuals (normally the victims) to carry out prosecutions which can lead to wrongly charging someone due to bias and being to close to the case. Holmes' plays as the justice in this story and for the characters. He's always trying to make sure that none of the characters are wrongly charged for a crime and is always going off of facts and what he observes from the crime scenes to piece things together. I also think Doyle having Sherlock Holmes as a private investigator really ties into the point I made earlier about private individuals pursuing prosecutions and how he really wanted someone who will look at the whole picture and only state the facts and stay on the line of justice when it comes to solving crimes.

At first I didn't understand what the word alienist meant when it came to being a doctor. When I looked it up I found out that the word originates from France. Alienist became a thing in the 1860-65 and the word means an expert witness in a sanity trial or a doctor specializing in the treatment of mental illness. For this reason, it makes sense that Marlow would ask the doctor if he was an alienist since the doctor was asking if his family ever experienced madness and how it is interesting to watch the mental changes of individuals. Before this time period though people started to notice mental health problems but they were normally pushed aside/ignored by being put into asylums. The treatment of mental health and how asylums were run started to change in the late 1880s. This was because Nelly Bly pretended to be mentally ill to be admitted into an asylum and wrote about her experience in great detail. So seeing Conrad writing about mental health and how it can change during certain experiences isn’t uncommon and actually makes sense for this time period. During the time Heart of Darkness was written mental health was really starting to be in the spotlight and being looked at with a different light. I also noticed that throughout the book mental health has a re-occurrence but is seen as going mad/losing who you are and think you are.

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