Nothing is ever what it seems in Agatha Christie’s novel, because the limitations between reality and fiction or rather truth and deceit are blurring and real. The acclaimed novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd integrates the subtle techniques of hiding the meaning of the truth by the narrator by means of which when a special narrator-reader connection is created, trust is assumed from the narrator by the reader by means that the narrator would not deceive the reader. This coalition has the reader enter a novel where deductions, details and misleading pathways play a starring role. The most misleading pathway would be that of the idea of truth. The truth in this novel, while being the main goal, is subjective and is able to be twisted while not
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The novel mainly uses this technique of disguise: Sheppard ruses as a person who is unconvincing as a murderer. But this masquerade is taken to a higher level as the method of concealment is doubled: the murderer is obscured in the narration itself. How this is achieved is through first-person narration. The reader normally takes the word of mouth from the narrator as the universal truth, but since the narrator himself was the murderer he was able to deceive the reader in a way that bent the truth, but never was a complete lie. This effect is heightened by other methods that are essentially used to facilitate the production of illusion. One method being the double entendre discourse or statements that have two completely different interpretations. Think of the truth as a Two Level Theory, there is the surface level and the hidden, deeper level. The surface level is what things appear to be as such as words or actions and the deeper, hidden level is what the characters are hiding from reality, such as when Dr. Sheppard describes upon witnessing the body after the murder. Innocently he claims, “Ackroyd was sitting as [he] had left him in the armchair before the fire” (Chapter 5). Yet, this quote has two meanings …show more content…
Yet, in the end we are left with the absolute truth, affirmed by the narrator himself, that he is the murderer. Can we really trust this truth or is it another disguise of the actual truth? We may never know but I believe as readers we should accept the truth and understand why it was disguised in the first place; as means of hiding a
The novel mainly uses this technique of disguise: Sheppard ruses as a person who is unconvincing as a murderer. But this masquerade is taken to a higher level as the method of concealment is doubled: the murderer is obscured in the narration itself. How this is achieved is through first-person narration. The reader normally takes the word of mouth from the narrator as the universal truth, but since the narrator himself was the murderer he was able to deceive the reader in a way that bent the truth, but never was a complete lie. This effect is heightened by other methods that are essentially used to facilitate the production of illusion. One method being the double entendre discourse or statements that have two completely different interpretations. Think of the truth as a Two Level Theory, there is the surface level and the hidden, deeper level. The surface level is what things appear to be as such as words or actions and the deeper, hidden level is what the characters are hiding from reality, such as when Dr. Sheppard describes upon witnessing the body after the murder. Innocently he claims, “Ackroyd was sitting as [he] had left him in the armchair before the fire” (Chapter 5). Yet, this quote has two meanings …show more content…
Yet, in the end we are left with the absolute truth, affirmed by the narrator himself, that he is the murderer. Can we really trust this truth or is it another disguise of the actual truth? We may never know but I believe as readers we should accept the truth and understand why it was disguised in the first place; as means of hiding a