Greek Mythological Elements In Agatha Christie’s Voyage Trilogy Triology

As a world-renowned British detective novelist,Agatha Christie is a prolific writer who is loved by readers around the world.Her masterpieces Murder on the Orient Express,Death on the Nile and Death in the Clouds are about cases encountered by Detective Poirot while travelling by train,ship,and plane,namely the Voyage Trilogy.This thesis will study the Voyage Trilogy from the perspective of archetypal criticism,contemplating how the three novels find archetypes in images,characterization and narrative from the Greek Mythology.The archetypal characters in the voyage trilogy are analyzed in the first chapter.Detective Poirot’s archetype can be traced back to Hercules,the famous hero of Greek mythology whose actions and motivation can be explained by Frye’s five characters framework.Being the hero of ordinary people,Poirot is a hero in the low imitation stage.On the contrary,the Evil Creatures in Greek Mythology are archetypes for Christie’s murderers.Interestingly,victims in the Trilogy corresponding to the Scapegoat in Greek Mythology fall into victim very often by their own faults and are commonly hated which reflects Christie’s philosophy: None of the victims is innocent.The following chapter tries to prove that many images in the trilogy derived from the collective unconsciousness of human beings,archetypal memories.Three important images are studied here: the color red,weapon and water with an understanding of connection to Greek mythology.Red symbolizes killing,life and death;murder weapon symbolizes violence and revenge;water symbolizes life and death,hope and disaster.The last chapter explores the narrative mode,perspective and structure of the trilogy.The diegesis and mimesis are narrative methods that have been proposed and used as early as the Greek era.The narrative perspective of Christie’s detective works also inherits from the elements of Greek mythology incorporating author’s omniscience perspective,integrated omniscience perspective and limited perspective.In the trilogy,the author’s omniscience perspective and limited perspective are used,but the integrated omniscience perspective is not.In terms of narrative structure,the trilogy uses the narrative structure of general detective fiction: case emergence,investigation,reasoning,and case resolution.This is in line with the narrative model of Greek mythology,the coming of disaster,the advent of heroes,and punishment for evil.In conclusion,plenty of Greek mythological elements in the trilogy indicate that Christie was deeply influenced by Greek mythology during her creation.Christie not only inherits the archetypal characters,image,and narratives,but also develops them and then forms her own unique writing style.In fact,the using of archetypal characters,image,and narratives can be regarded as the intertextual reference between Greek mythology and Christie’s voyage trilogy,which expand the connotation and improve the literariness of popular literature.Christie’s voyage trilogy is so popular perhaps because of the intertextuality of her works and Greek mythology.