Universidade Federal do Ceará

Centro de Humanidades
Departamento de Estudos da Língua Inglesa, suas Literaturas e Tradução
Curso de Licenciatura em Letras-Inglês

Student: Caio Falcão Pereira

Professor: Paulo Roberto Nogueira
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THE NARRATIVE FOCUS IN AGATHA CHRISTIE’S MURDER ON

THE ORIENT EXPRESS

A story is basically a delay. When telling stories, sequences of events can be

summarized in some minutes, but what makes them different, interesting, exciting and
instigating people's feelings is the way they are told or written (BARTHES, 1971). The gaps
between each event of a narrative open the possibility of summarizing, distorting, expanding,
reducing as a free choice to retrieve and create the feelings that emerge from the story being
shown, especially in tragedies, where tension, fear and the mystery take place.
In “Poetics” Aristotle asserts that the first essential, the life and soul of the
tragedy, which is one genre of narrative, is the plot; he defines a tragedy as an “action of a
destructive or painful nature; such as murders, tutures, woundings and the like.” As we know,
these elements are the exact major matters in detective novels today. In this sense, It is
possible to convain that tragedy is just the literary form which the detective novel chose in his
days. Thus we can firmly argue that what Aristotle says about tragedy is relatable to detective
novels in the beginning of the 20th century.
From this perspective, Roland Barthes points out the concept of hermeneutic
code. It consists in defining the space between the sequence of steps in a narrative, and this
process delays the story, so the role of the narrative is to separate and change the
configuration of the events, and this separation creates the time for the reader to reflect,
suppose and interpret the story they are reading.
Though, what does this concept relate to Agatha’s novels? Basically, the central
business of her detective stories is the puzzle. Overall, this genre leaves the writer no room
for showing off, so the writing of the narrative needs to be consistent and not that prolonged,
in order to make the reader concentrate on the puzzle of the story. Most of the time, the genre
creates a game between the author and the reader, which includes what Barthes points out,
the reflections, guessings, false clues and omissions. On the other hand, what the writer says
pushes the story forward, must have a bearing on the plot. So it is the plot that matters the
most and counts in the construction of the suspense.
 Now, especially about the novel, it has some special characteristics. In an
ordinary detective story, it is most likely that one or two of the possible suspects will turn out
to be the guilty party and much more closely connected to the dead person than she or he
pretends. But in Murder on the Orient Express, we are made aware that one after another of
the suspects, who are instead of just 2, twelve are connected with the murder case. In the end
the criminals are let off scot-free because they are in a situation the law cannot handle and
therefore they should not be punished.
In this novel, the narrator is the controller of the perspective and has it full and
clear, but always selectively displays the storyline from a specific observation perspective,
and this strategy helps to hide specific information. In the opening chapter of the novel, the
narrator uses his perspective to present the Orient Express and the characters, but Detective
Piorot appearing as a stranger not only makes the narrative lively and humorous, but also
creates a short-term suspense.
At the night of the murder, the narrator deliberately takes off his omniscient
perspective, and instead projects the focus on Detective Poirot, leading the reader to have his
reactions to the terrifying sound and confusing scenes on the night of the murder. This scene
renders a kind of tense and confusing suspense.
Thus, the emptiness of the deliberate omissions creates narrative gaps in key
information, enhances narrative motivation and tension in the plot, and actively mobilizes
readers’ emotions and passion for reading, which not only effectively enhance the suspense
of the detective story, but also bury the foreshadowing at the most suspenseful ending,
leading the readers to “continue to trace and think curiously”.
In conclusion, Agatha Christie’s techniques on the narrative focus of the novel
rely on purposeful withdraw of a dimension of wholeness in the plot information, in other
words, her centralization on characters, like a very narrow scope, show just little relevant
details in order to wide it afterwards for the reader to see how many and what facts were
hidden and distorted in the story, unleashing the feeling of having many information behind
the scenes.

REFERENCES

BARTHES, Roland. Análise estrutural da narrativa. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1971.

DURETT, Martha. THE AGATHA CHRISTIE FORMULA. (2017). Disponível em:

https://marthadurrett.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/christie-paper.pdf.

McLEISH, K. (2000). Aristóteles: A Poética de Aristóteles. Unesp.

SINGER, Eliot A. . The Whodunit as Riddle: Block Elements in Agatha Christie. No. 3, vol.
43, pp. 157-171, Western Folklore, (1984).

XU, X. (2009). The Plot Construction in Agatha Christie's Novels. Asian Social Science.
Zhang Yuhao. The Narrative Construction of Agatha Christie's Detective Novels--Take
Murder on the Orient Express as an example. Advances in Educational Technology and
Psychology (2021) 5: 24-27