A Study Of Narrative Features Of The ABC Murders

In one and half century of detective fiction’s history, a great many excellentdetective fictions, some of which are so classical and hard to surpass. But, detectivefiction failed to get much attention of the literary critics, leaving very few words inliterature history. However, the charm of detective fiction could not be erased. Thedetective fiction is so popular around the world. Can it be categorized into the artclassification like the works of Shakespeare? This thesis is going to study the famousdetective novel written by Agatha Christie, entitled The ABC Murders, in order toresearch on its article value.So far, the researches of the detective fiction mostly concentrated on the ideology andsocial influence. The researches of Christie, either those who defend, or those whoaccuse of are more or less subjective. Whether they like or dislike her is a matter of theirown taste and has little to do with her true art. The author of this thesis thinks that, inorder to study the level of the inner art value, besides studying the text, more analysison of the artistic construction should be done in order to touch the essence of artisticworks. This thesis will apply the narrative theory to study the narrative style, narrativetechniques and narrative language features of the novel The ABC Murders. The aim ofthe study is to re-examine the art and value of Christie’s detective novel in the aspect ofnarration.Modern narrative analysis begins with the study of Propp’s study of story whichjust considers the story its own, little attention has been paid to the ways of story telling.The object of narratology has its own system which puts an end to any intervention ofthe influence of author’s psychology and the reading and production of social conditions.The research of the detective fiction in this thesis focuses on the narrators and narrativelanguage features. Narrator, as one of the most important elements, which is the mediaused by the author to tell the story, makes the novel seems more authentic and more reliable. The study of the narrative language features includes the conversation analysisand suspense of language. In Christie’s detective novels, a notable feature of narrativelanguage is simple and clear. Besides, the conversation is indispensable, which providedcertain information, inspiration of solving the crime and important clues. Themanagement of the conversation is so skillful and forethoughtful. A simple sentence infront of the novel could be the key point to solve the myth later. Through the study ofThe ABC Murders, this thesis analyzed the narrative features of Christie’s novels in theaspect of narratology. The reason why Christie’s works have been popular for such along time mainly based on its language features which are polysemy and simple wordsthat express complex meaning. No matter its narrative structure or language featuresshows Christie’s excellent controlling ability of the language. As one of Christie’s mostoutstanding novels, The ABC Murders is a novel with modern narrative features.