A Narrative Study On Agatha Christie's Lord Edgware Dies

Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of detective fiction.She creates more than 80 detective stories and short story collections in her writing career.The sales of her works are more than one billion.Meanwhile her works are translated into more than one hundred languages,which makes her detective stories accessible to readers from different cultural backgrounds.As a representative detective writer in the “Golden Age” of detective fiction,Christie inherits the useful elements from classical detective stories and promotes the writing skills of detective fiction,which produces a huge influence to the development of detective literature.Literary circle carry out researches towards Agatha Christie from various perspectives.Some scholars explore her writing characteristics from her life experience.Some scholars make theoretical analysis by taking her works as the starting point.From discussing Christie to analysing her works,scholars' researches are becoming more and more specific.All these researches provide the basis for a more comprehensive study about Christie.This dissertation takes Lord Edgware Dies,one of Agatha Christie's representative novels,as the research target.It studies the work from the perspective of narratology,which is helpful in clarify the framework and analyze the readability of detective works.Lord Edgware Dies is written under many writing techniques that Christie creates her detective stories.Scholars can take typical examples from this work to interpret how narrative techniques are applied into detective literature.The author takes Lord Edgware Dies as the research material and digs the inner value of Agatha Christie's detective series from narratology perspective.The author also explores the reason why her works enjoy high readability and sales.Agatha Christie applies different narrative techniques to construct Lord Edgware Dies.In this thesis,the author takes four typical narrative techniques from this work and analyzes them from the order of the primary level to minor level.In terms of narrative time,she applies anticipation and retroversion to create suspense and offer clues.Also she adopts ellipsis,pause and summary to alter narrative paces.As to narrative focalization,she combines characters' internal focalization and spectator's external focalization into one single work,which makes this work enjoys multiple focalizations.In the characterization part,Christie depicts her unique detective by giving description of the detective's appearance and analysing the detective's behaviours.Also she applies the-least-likely-suspect strategy and the-most-likely-suspect strategy to arrange the murderers.In plot construction,she uses omission and other narrative techniques to avoid bloody and violent scenes.Besides,she expresses her aspiration towards happy endings in her stories,which embodies her features as a female writer.The narrative charm in detective works build up the success of Christie's detective series.The author expects to interpret the function of narrative techniques in detective stories by the help of Lord Edgware Dies,and then explore the effect of narrative techniques in increasing stories' readability.