The Narrator and His Narrative in Agatha Christie’s «The Murder of Roger Ackroyd»

• Main Authors: Wei-pang Lin, 林維邦
• Other Authors: Yiching Teng
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/67485592137018192771

碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 外國語文學系 === 95 === In this thesis, we read detective fiction as purely a form of literature and narrative text. We take Agatha Christie’s masterpiece, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, to discuss its achievements in the detective genre, the patterns of its formula, and its ways of narrative. Furthermore, we discuss The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as a record of history and analyze it with theories of historical narrative. The Introduction offers the background knowledge detective fiction. Chapter one is the discussion of the literary formula of detective fiction. We will discuss Cawelti’s five patterns of the detective formula and their correspondences with Todorov’s analysis of the “story of the crime” and the “story of the investigation.” In the second chapter, we will read Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as a detective fiction to analyze how Dr. Sheppard plays the roles of “Watson” to Poirot and the murderer at the same time, and how he fails. In the third chapter, we regard The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as a historical record written by Dr. Sheppard. We will discuss the narrator Dr. Sheppard’s manipulation in his narrative of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and the problem of narrativization of real events with White and Mink’s ideas of historical narrative.